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Chapter Text

When employers make mistakes, it’s an employee’s prerogative to sigh as all tired employees do and get back to work lest you inspire a tirade about the values of a hard worker. But, there is no handbook on what to do when the mistake happens to be awakening the Overlord of the Vortex, That Which Lies in the Deep, the ancient god once defeated by your nation’s Archon two-thousand years ago. Unfortunately, Tartaglia, your employer at the time and 11th of the Fatui Harbingers, had gone and done exactly that. Hell, it wasn’t even a mistake—doesn’t even come close to an occupational hazard—he did it on purpose. 

That is why you are here almost six years after the fact, far away from your hometown of Liyue, nestled between the wildflowers and the mountains of Fontaine’s Marcotte Station. It’s not a bad life, admittedly. You were paid handsomely for your work with the Fatui prior, and they funded everything you wanted to research so long as you produced results with the Sigils of Permission they were so curious about at the time (although you now know exactly why ). The only big hiccup these past few years was the ordeal of the prophecy and the flood, but you only cursed your luck for being so entwined with nautical disasters and moved on from it. It’s an otherwise inoffensive life in a small cottage you’ve adorned with planters and wares and—

“Mama!” 

Two little kids who cannot let you practice calligraphy in peace.

“Mama!” the first calls out, your Nikolai. His deep blue eyes are alight with mirth and it inspires a mirroring joy within you.

“Look!” his sister, your Milena, waves her clenched fist as she bounds after her brother up the hill that your home crests, the same eyes looking between her hand and where you sit on the porch. A pale white dog follows closely behind, Hugo, his warm brown eyes watching the twins.

You chuckle with a shake of your head, setting the paper mounted on a clipboard and paint brush onto the porch table.

“What do you have for me, my loves?” you say, watching as the twins clamber up the steps towards you, cheeks tinged by their breathless run.

Marcotte Station’s mountains are clear of monsters for the most part—at least where you live. Your twins know to not stray far from you in their forays and to stick with each other if anything were to happen, and you never let them leave your sight. After all, it is not them who are being hunted.

Milena stands before you and Nikolai jumps in place beside her, the two buzzing with excitement. The younger of the twins unfurls her fist to reveal a red fruit in her palm. A wild strawberry. 

“Strawberries! At the forest!” Nikolai offers by way of explanation and Milena nods along fervently, wary of the bulb in her palm. 

You hum delightfully, pulling the two children up into your lap. Hugo sits dutifully at your feet and you give him a gentle rub on his soft fur.

“How did you two find this?” you ask, kissing each of their heads. 

The bright red heralds of spring, though it is quite early in the year for them to be fruiting. Mondstadt folklore says that tying a basket of strawberries to the horns of cattle will please the spirits of nature enough to provide you with an abundance of milk and fertile, healthy cows. They also believe that if a woman puts the leaves of strawberries in her pocket, her discomfort during pregnancy would be relieved. You’d like to believe that that is why your twins love the fruit so much.

“I saw it near the big tree, like a carpet!” Milena answers, still looking at the fruit in her hand. 

“Did you make sure it wasn’t a fairie trick?” you say. 

The twins’ faces drop in unison, glancing at each other in caution; their silent twinspeak. 

“There—there was no circle…” Milena adds unsurely, and Nikolai deflates next to her. 

“Ai, I’m only teasing littluns, how about we go back and collect some more, hm?” 

The twins are once again animated in your lap, buzzing with agreement. You grab a basket, following the excited children down the hill and to the giant hawthorn that sits at the edge of the clearing.

The fair folk of Fontaine are guileful little things, tricksters by nature and kind in the rare times they choose to be. Folklorists of Teyvat link some iterations of faeries back to the ancient race of seelies, though what exactly a seelie is remains undefined. Stories of the ‘fae’ are not abundant in areas of Liyue because of the widespread belief in the adepti, likewise with the yōkai of Inazuma. The pari and aranara of Sumeru are often considered to be a classification of the fae, and Natlan’s monetoo are of a similar nature. Such beings are believed to be stewards of the earth in some way or another, helping out humans and sometimes even living along or among the citizens of their respective nations if they are not being harmlessly mischievous.

“Let’s leave some for the forest, kiddos, alright?” you say, watching Hugo wag his fluffy tuft of a tail as he circles watchfully around the children who have stooped down without a care for the hems of their dungarees or the elbow grease you’d need to get the dirt off them.

“Okay mama,” Milena replies, and you laugh because Nikolai is so concentrated on his strawberry-picking that he barely hears a word. 

Stories pertaining to fae folk in Fontaine, Mondstadt, and Snezhnaya are far more worrying for a parent of two. Kidnappings, changelings, traps and revels where you dance to your death. Spirits that lurk in the woods, a creature with claws that steals naughty children away in a basket, a hydro-mimic horse that drowns their victims and leaves their innards by their watery habitats. 

Suffice to say that as your children amble happily with their basket of plump red fruits back up the hill home with Hugo herding closely behind, you glance back at the patch of wild strawberries, the mass of red dots in the green thicket far less numerous than before your twins descended upon them. You pluck a button from your sleeve and place it gingerly on the rock that leads into the small burrow under the thick roots of the hawthorn tree.

You’ve lived alongside this forest for a good few years, perhaps the fair folk will look kindly upon you and help strengthen the wards. You turn back to face the retreating forms of your twins, Nikolai chasing Milena whilst screaming ‘Milly, Milly!’. 

Endearment swells in your chest. 

How you love it so, this new life of yours with the two manifestations of your very soul.

Ajax has a problem. No, it’s not the All-Devouring Narwhal that he had awakened when he fell into the Abyss at fourteen which may or may not have been following him since. No, it’s not the fact that the whale is responsible for the prophesized drowning of a nation. This wouldn’t be the first time Ajax has had a run-in with ancient beasts with a penchant for inundating an entire country—which is to say this isn’t his first rodeo (although the first time was completely intentional). 

If he was in a work of fiction, all this water and flooding and drowning business might be foreshadowing something in his character’s fate. Might be. But alas, that is not his problem. His problem isn’t even that he singed the scarf his mother had woven for him in his unending fight with the whale. His problem is that the damned lute player outside his cabin on this Fatui ship is absolute dogshit. He wakes with a start, feeling for the necklace in his jacket pocket. He breathes a sigh of relief when he finds it tucked safely in its hiding place.

He gets it, he was probably knocked out and his underlings were instructed to lug him back to Snezhnaya on the first boat out that day. He’d be fine with it either way; a boat’s a boat and he could escape any time. Water is his friend, after all. What is unacceptable is that an organization such as the Fatui, the loyal soldiers of his immanence, the Tsaritsa, would employ a musically inept lute player. 

It is entirely disgraceful! Does art mean nothing to these people?

With a wheeze that would surely be concerning to any physician, Ajax heaves himself up from his bed, planting his feet firmly on the wooden floor despite the dizziness that washes over his head. He doesn’t know how long he’s been asleep, but surely it’ll make up for the months of sleeplessness he accrued fighting the persistent fish (if Tonia was here, she’d punch him in the shoulder and tell him that whales aren’t fish, idiot ).

Taking a moment to steady himself, he finally throws the door of his cabin open and a blanket of silence falls over the Fatui gathered around the lute player who sits on a barrel under the ship’s mast. Even the guy high up in the crow’s nest shrinks a little. Ajax says nothing, levels a look across the crowd with a hum and turns around to hop up onto the ship’s stern. 

He glances at the lute player over his shoulder, “Baba Yaga never took pity on Vasilisa, the witch was only scared of her blessing—sing it right, comrade.”

Folktales have a sophisticated system of classification, Ajax learned six years ago. For all his love of story and theatre, only in Liyue did he truly learn the depths of folklore. It may seem frivolous on the surface, coming up with a complex index to organize the world’s stories. But, he was taught by a certain folklorist to go beyond the story itself, to realize the human motivations behind each one. 

He supposes that’s why he fell into the Abyss those years ago, all lanky limbs and stubborn teeth and fourteen young years that led him down the windy woods behind his house that night despite his mother’s many cautionary tales of the Leshy that lurks in Morepesok’s wilderness waiting to steal children away. The Leshy isn’t just folklore, it is what parents used to warn their children away from said woods, inciting fear in hopes that they could deter even just a little bit of the natural youthful curiosity that could lead them down a path they could never come back from. 

“It’s natural for parents to want to do anything they can to protect their children, fairytales are a tool to do so,” he remembers that voice so clearly, as if it came from his own throat. How he misses it, so sweet in the throes of twilight, too. It’s been almost six years since then, since the quiet parting that took a part of him. 

Ajax has grown, he’d like to think. He’s the slightest bit more mature—he even tried a beard for a month before the strange looks from his colleagues told him it was maybe too much too soon (which he thinks is quite ridiculous, he’s in his thirties!).

With that, Ajax leaps off the stern into the black Fontaine night, ignoring the desperate concerned calls of those likely tasked with escorting him without incident back to Snezhnaya. 

Milena greatly desires a papa. She first learned of the idea three years ago, when mama told her a bedtime story about a man called Lir and his four lovely children. Lir loved his wife and his four children, but she died giving birth to their youngest twins—but you’re still alive, so if she had a papa, he could love you forever! Anyways, Lir’s children were cursed by his new wife to become swans bound to three bodies of water for nine-hundred years—Milena doesn’t want to be bound to lakes for that long, but that’s not the point. Lir loved his children greatly, even if he constantly had to travel back to the lake to see them. Milena wants to be her papa’s swan, minus the part where she is parted from him and finds his abode derelict when she is finally allowed to reunite with him. Anyways, there’s probably a better example. Point is, Milena wants to have a papa.

Actually, Milena is fond of many things: Milly time, owls, letting you braid her hair. Bugs too, beetles and butterflies especially. Fireflies are perhaps her third favourite. Nikolai, on the other hand, hates bugs, but loves all manner of sea creatures. Their occasional trip down to the ocean to see bioluminescence has to be his favourite thing in the world after cool swords. They share in a love of the èrhú hanging above the fireplace mantel and they especially love when you play, and they also share in love of vareniki and mora meat and especially macarons.

Despite letting them roam around, you seem unusually protective of them. Though, Milena would use the word ‘unusually’ sparingly because, after all, she’s barely known anything else. Her point of comparison may be Hugo; mama never cries when Hugo eats a worm or cracks his head open (okay, that’s only ever happened to Nikolai) or wanders too far from home (Milena thinks she’s the only one that notices tears flood your eyes after a scare). 

She recalls once, the second year at Marcotte Station, when she and Nikolai devised a plan to sneak out early in the morning whilst you slept to gather wildflowers and put them in a vase as a birthday gift; asters and goldenrods. Asters came to be when a star wept over Teyvat, and goldenrods are believed to be very good medicine.

Milena and Nikolai had slinked out of their plush bed in their small attic bedroom and (tried to) quietly put on their shoes and coat, opening the door ever-so-slightly to slip through. Hugo followed, of course, tailing them with a look that said ‘you’re getting in trouble for sure, but I need to do my job’. They had snuck past the qilin stationed around the forest and made for the patch of the yellow and purple wildflowers to begin their collection. Milena is in love with the Fontainian countryside, but then again she’s never lived anywhere else—that doesn’t diminish her love for it, though. The dewy mornings, the fog settling into the dips of the mountains, flowers speckling the grass; it’s beautiful. 

Anyways, when, halfway through plucking a bushy stem of aster from the ground, Milena heard a desperate scream that at first made her think of the banshee you sometimes talk about, she wanted a papa even more. A papa would protect them whilst they pick flowers. Most importantly, a papa would comfort mama; you wouldn’t be so scared of losing her and Nikolai all the time.

All these thoughts and she’s only five! Milena thinks she ought to be a leading researcher in the Fontaine Research Institute nearby, although it doesn’t really look fit to study in right now. She looks at you, who is now wrapping a bandage around Nikolai’s knee because he had scraped it in a fall. She watches you kiss his head and wipe his tears and she thinks of the day of your birthday again.

“Mama don’t cry,” Milena had said, almost suffocating in your tight embrace. 

“Don’t you ever do that again, do you understand?” you didn’t do what she asked and cried even more. 

Milena had reached up with her tiny hands, brushing your tears away from your face. She didn’t really understand why you were crying, only that she didn’t like seeing it, and she wanted to do anything to make sure you never cried again. That’s what a papa would do, wipe your tears and protect you from any harm.

“We wanted flowers for mama’s birthday!” Nikolai said.

“It’s okay Niko,” you sniffled, “it’s not your job to take care of me, okay? That’s my job, I’m an adult.”

If adults are the only ones allowed to take care of other people, then Milena is going to get an adult papa and he will take care of her adult mama. 

The will-o'-the-wisp is a Fontainian legend that bears resemblance to the real-life seelies found all over Teyvat. It is an awfully convenient tale of a trickster spirit that gives you peace of mind as a parent, knowing that your children would be just a little bit scared of venturing out into the woods alone enough not to follow strange lights at night. 

Ignis fatuus, the ancient name for the creature; fool's flame. Coincidentally, the latter adjective part of the moniker is what the Snezhnayan military call themselves. The Fatui, the fools. Or rather, one such Fatuus made a fool of you. You suppose that’s your fault for following the very thing you are not supposed to. After all, wisps are much like seelies, and seelies lead to treasure. 

How could you not, though? He was like the sun. You refrain from drawing parallels between a certain wax-winged mortal in a myth and yourself. Besides, your present predicament is much more pressing than what happened years ago. 

“Niko!” you call out, only to be met with the mocking echo of your own voice in the dark, empty Marcotte woods. “Niko, where are you baby?”

You took your eyes off him for one minute. Milena had a fever at dinnertime, and you wanted them to sleep separately so Nikolai doesn’t catch whatever his sister’s contracted; he’s always had a weaker constitution between the two. You’d left him in his bed in their shared room, promising to return after you bring Milena to yours to keep an eye on her through the night. It was only a minute, but when you returned, Nikolai was not there. The window wasn’t open, and his shoes and coat were gone so he wasn’t snatched—but that doesn't do anything to assuage your worries. Leaving Hugo to keep watch over Milena, you throw on a coat and venture out into the night. 

Here you are now, at a crossroads about whether your son would have gone towards the Loch where you hunt game or the ruins of the Research Institute where the clockwork meka run rampant. Your wards are down, so you cannot sense him. 

They are never out of your sight, or the detection of your wards.

“Bai, Lian, did you see Niko?” you say to the two dendro constructs patrolling the area.

Your dendro constructs, the two qilin that are animated at night in place of the wards that you have yet to learn to keep up long enough to span overnight. When night falls, the wards go down and the creatures come alive from piles of moss and bark that you spelled. They go back into slumber at the dawning of the day, and your wards spread like vines once again like clockwork.

The chimeras shake their heads in unison, returning to their surveillance. You should not spend time on pointless frustration; you constructed them for protection, not babysitting. You run past the creatures, calling out for your son again.

What if he didn’t even go either way? A part of you thinks about a fiery head of hair and the dusting of freckles, striking blue eyes in a snowy forest and an Abyss that swallows.

“Nikolai!” you try again more desperately, running further into the thicket of trees. “Where are you, Niko?”

If you don’t find him soon, you will need Hugo’s nose, but that would mean either leaving Milena alone or bringing her along with you despite her ailment. Your heart is in your throat.

Finally, finally, you hear the slightest rustling of a bush nearby, right outside the edge of the forest, and your chest swells with hope when you approach the foliage, parting the mass of leaves to reveal a shaking Nikolai curled up on the floor, hand muffling his crying.

“Nikolai! You scared me half to death!” you swoop him up into your arms and the boy starts to weep into the crook of your neck. “Don’t you ever do that again—why didn’t you answer me?”

“You said—” he hiccups, “you said faeries trick us at night!”

“Then why did you come out here?” you chide, smoothing out the wrinkles of his coat as you tread back home. You try not to cry in relief.

“I saw a—a wisp…” he says meekly, “I thought it had something to make Milly feel better!”

You grimace, hugging your son’s little body closer to you as you approach the wooden steps of the house. Maybe you should withhold the fairytales and warn them of the real dangers, the wolves and clockwork meka that litter this side of the nation. The hunters. 

Only when you became a parent yourself did you realize that fairytales are also born of the desire on an adult’s part to comfort themselves, to keep their children away from the realities that the world has to offer for just long enough to grant them some semblance of childhood wonder. 

“You remember what I said about them, right? You don’t know if they’ll lead to treasure or to tricks, you have to be careful.”

Your son looks up at you, striking blue eyes and the dusting of freckles across his nose, “yes, mama, I promise.”

“That’s my boy,” you say, kissing his nose and earning a cute scrunch of his face. 

“Don’t cry, okay mama?” he says and you falter slightly in your steps. 

Seelies lead to treasure, wills-o'-the-wisp lead to demise. They happen to look the same according to human testimony—some folklorists you’ve studied suggest that there is no difference if you trace accounts back far enough; some seelies already lead you to ley lines that spawn monsters. 

“Ai, I’m okay baby, you don’t need to worry,” you reply, “I’ll take care of you.”

Seelies and Ignes Fatui. Treasure and trickery. 

That has no place in this life.

Chapter Text

Ajax may be currently luckless in what he’s been looking for in Fontaine, but boy is this Heloir kid a delight. Never has he met a ten year-old with such a penchant for mysterious liquids and he’s all the more entertained for it.  

“Master Childe,” she says now, sitting at her desk over beakers and flasks filled with concerning contents.

“Yes, Heloir?” he replies with a cough.

He has not yet recovered from his fight with the oversized fish (yes, Tonia, I know whales aren’t fish, he says in his head), and his body feels the ramifications of it still.

“Pass me that purple bottle over there,” she commands without looking up from her work, holding her hand out expectantly. 

He’s only been with the House of the Hearth for a few days but already he adores the children under the Knave’s care as if they were his very own siblings. Very weird, unsettlingly murderous siblings, but alas, kids will be kids—especially Fatui kids, apparently. Does that make Arlecchino his ‘Father’ in this imaginary scenario, too? He shivers at the thought. 

Heloir makes impatient grabby hands to catch his attention and he snaps out of his thoughts, crossing the room to fetch her what she’s requested. There’s a very vivid stick-figure drawing on the label of the bottle which depicts someone’s eyeballs on fire. Ajax shivers at this too.

“Whatcha cooking up?” he says, watching the liquid pouring from the bottle sizzle as it meets the contents of her small crucible.

“A sticky poison,” she states.

Ajax juts his bottom lip out thoughtfully, “what does it do?”

“It sticks people to the floor and kills them, duh,” she replies, rolling her eyes. 

Now, what does that have to do with torching eyeballs?

He furrows his brows, “what do you need it for?”

At that, Heloir pauses. She sets her things down, looking conspiratorially around the empty room before she beckons him closer, cupping his ear and speaking in a whisper.

“We’re hunting a witch,” she says.

Ajax’s eyes light up in surprise, but he recovers quickly, “a witch?”

“Ugh, yes Master Childe, do I have to say everything twice?” she huffs, pulling away from his ear. 

“Aw, c’mon little squirt, humour me,” he grins.

“Fine,” she says, going back to her ‘sticky poison’. “There’s a witch that we’ve been hunting for like… five years. She’s got magic and everything so the winner gets to keep her skull.”

Ajax does not see where there is correlation between magic and skull collection, but he digresses. He fishes out the necklace in his jacket pocket and fiddles with it as Heloir explains.

“I want it as a paperweight,” she adds. Grim, but classic. 

He mirrors her mischief, “I want in.”

Though he can’t help but think of someone, five, almost six, years ago in his apartment at the very heart of Liyue Harbour, telling him about witches. Sometimes believed to be a harbinger of the Devil, a practitioner of malevolent magic tempted into sin in an otherwise pure life leading up. Some believe that witches are born as such, practicing magic that can be both good and evil since infancy. He was told that the belief in witches ‘probably stemmed from cosmic horror’, blaming human beings for unexplainable bad luck. ‘That, or they hated the women they accused’ he was also told, ‘or both’. 

He misses that voice. Ajax grips the necklace tighter.

Heloir squints at him, “how good are you at hunting?”

“There’s nothing I can’t do,” he affirms.

“That attitude will kill you,” she retorts.

“Where did you learn such words?” he gasps. 

She really does have a colourful vocabulary for a ten year-old. 

“Older kids say it,” she shrugs. 

He laughs at this, “what do I have to do?”

Heloir gives him a once-over and decides that he is worthy of her time. She tells him of the witch who disappeared mysteriously in the middle of the night from their grasp, and now the children get to compete to hunt her down. She divulges all the details of the witch’s known past locations and hide-outs, even the ones they theorized that she stayed in without having much proof beyond traces of ‘magic’ as they call it. Although, he slowly realizes throughout Heloir’s lecture that the ‘witch’ may just be a dendro user who is not very good at hand-to-hand combat. The present is often cruel to memory.

“We have to wear this flag when we hunt,” Heloir adds, “'Father' says so.”

Ajax feels a rumble of challenge in his chest, “and we listen to 'Father', don’t we?”

“Ai, don’t play with your food, Niko,” you scold the boy who is swirling around strings of ginger in his congee.

“I don’t wanna eat it,” he huffs, pouting. 

Of course Nikolai is sick. Whatever chance he had of overcoming the germs in his system dwindled as soon as he stepped out into the mountainous cold a week ago. 

“You’re the one who went outside in the cold,” you chide.

Your boy grumbles before spooning a thick globule of gingery rice into his mouth and making an effort to show you that his sore throat makes it hard to swallow. Milena rolls her eyes.

“Babies, I have to go into the city today,” you say, “will you stay here with Hugo while I’m gone?”

They make a simultaneous sound of protest. 

“Don’t be like that now,” you scold, “you’re both ill.”

“I want macarons,” Nikolai says ruefully. 

“I wanna go too!” Milena says, pouting.

“You can come with me next month. You’re sick right now, you can’t come because you’re not well enough to walk around with me, understand?”

“Why can’t we go whenever we wanna?” your son huffs.

“Is it your adult job?” Milena adds.

You purse your lips. 

“If you bring a papa home, he can help us, right?” she prods.

Your Milena, too curious for her own good. You don’t think she really understood the concept of fathers when she first demanded one when she was three—she just liked the idea. Now, though, she’s gathered a lot through listening to fairy tales and asking a plethora of questions you do not know how to answer. It’s not like there’s a handbook that tells you how to deal with a child who has an overzealous desire for a father figure. You don’t understand why Nikolai shows no trace of the same enthusiasm either; they usually share in everything. 

“Milly, we’ve talked about this,” you say, “it’s not how it works my love.”

“Why not?” she argues, “the papa in the stories falls in love with the mama and then they get married and then they have babies and they love each other forever!”

Despite her lung capacity, you don’t have the heart to tell her that it actually could work without that strict order, and that each step is optional. Abyss below, you were living proof.

“We are fine just the way we are, you know this,” you sigh. 

Milena looks like she wants to argue, but decides against it for her own good.

“I will go as quickly as I can,” you say with finality, “you both be good for Hugo.”

“Fine!” Milena huffs. 

You smile softly, picking her up off her chair and onto your lap apologetically. 

To your trepidation, your children like to think themselves somewhat independent souls. They fancy making a show of their ‘grown-up’ qualities—like Milena having her ‘Milly time’ where she goes to sit outside on the bench to think, and Nikolai who likes to go ahead with Hugo on walks to ‘protect’ you who stays at the rear. They’re only five, you don’t know where they got it from.

Your daughter ignores your affection, but plays with the dendro pearls of your necklace as Nikolai speaks.

“Can you play the èrhú for us when you come back?” Nikolai says meekly. 

You reach over to pinch his nose, “of course baby, I’ll do just that.”

Ajax should be heading back to Snezhnaya. There is no trace of his master here in Fontaine and even with the Knave’s help, although greatly appreciated, his search bears no fruit. Though, a new sense of respect for the fellow Harbinger has been renewed within him from his stay at the House of the Hearth.

Heloir has dragged him along with her today in order to catch a glimpse of the witch on her ‘immunity day’, whatever that means. Ajax doesn’t mind, though, a stakeout with a murderous ten year-old has always been on his wishlist.

He hasn’t been taking the hunt too seriously, but he has been using it as an excuse to explore the Fontainian countryside; who would have thought that clockwork meka would be such entertaining enemies? He doesn’t understand the Arkhe System so much as he knows that he is able to slash his way through all the hunks of metal regardless of their alignment—some of them even remind him of the creaky machines he hears when he walks past Sandrone’s laboratory. 

He’s on his second pouch of conch madeleines without any sign of this mysterious figure, and he’s starting to curse her in his mind for boring him. But alas, first impressions can be deceiving. As he fiddles with the necklace inside its home of his jacket pocket, Heloir speaks.

“She’s alone,” she says under her breath and Ajax jolts up, brushing crumbs off on his jacket.

He follows her line of sight to the hooded figure filtering through the crowd, approaching the cubby-hole just metres away from where they are hiding. He cannot see the witch’s face but something in him stirs. 

Her nose peeks out from her hood when she leans forward. Has his fight with that damned whale really affected him so much that his past is haunting him? 

“No, Master Childe!” Heloir whisper-shouts, grabbing with all the force of a feisty ten year-old onto his collar. “Today’s an immunity day, you can’t hunt her!”

“Well I’m not hunting her, I want to talk to—”

“You can’t! Father will have your head!”

The witch tucks the envelope into her satchel, glancing around the vicinity before slipping away into the crowd. The bustle of the weekend makes for a sea of people today.

Ajax tries once again to get up, but Heloir does not let him go. 

“Master Childe, I will make you drink poison in your sleep!”

“Ha! I’d like to see you try, little squirt,” he says dismissively, resisting her hold. The figure is blending into the crowd too fast for his liking, and before long his eyes lose their target.

By the time he wrenches himself free of Heloir’s death grip and runs into the busy street, he does not know where to go. Damn it. 

He turns back to Heloir, crossing his arms.

“Do you know who the witch is?”

“Nope,” she replies, popping the ‘p’.

“Right,” Ajax says, grinning. “I’m going for a hunt tomorrow.”

Heloir makes a noise of indignation, “you have to take me!”

“Nah,” he ruffles her hair, “I don’t wanna share.”

Your anxiety did not allow you to stop by the shops to grab macarons for the twins, only rushing back after collecting your monthly stipend in fear of their fever rising. You played two songs on the èrhú, and that sated them enough for an agreement to a nap. 

The next day, as you gather herbs in the forest, you hum the tune of the Fontainian nursery rhyme about the mouse that went up the clock as you crouch in front a patch of stinging nettle and slip on your knitted gloves, gathering the top parts of the plant. The leaves are at their best during the springtime, before they flower in the summer.

You work away with the tune when your collarbone suddenly feels hot, a surge of dendro power that sparks against your skin and burns up just as quick as it came. A bead of your necklace is gone. 

Someone is inside the wards. 

When you first stumbled into the House of the Hearth, you had offered knowledge in exchange for their help. You were a folklorist, surely they had something they wanted to know that would require your expertise. Liyue was unlivable because despite the diplomatic shitshow, the Fatui still crawled all over the place, so you ran.

“I only need protection from the Fatui, I can do research, I can teach the children, I can clean—”

You only needed to outlast the Fatui bounty. 

There’s a system in place within the organization, the Fatui statute of limitations of sorts, unspoken caps for how long and how intensely they want to pursue someone who’s wronged them before other things take precedence. See, the Fatui make enemies of so many people that they can’t possibly keep track of all their bounties. 

For reasons unbeknownst to you, your bounty is ridiculously long. Ten years for something that wasn’t even really an offense; you were the one being deceived. They wanted you for ‘abandoning ship’, whatever that means. At least your bounty isn’t high priority—and you only know this thanks to kind strangers back in Liyue’s Adventurer’s Guild.

The woman that the children called ‘Father’ paid you no mind, only asking you one question.

“Can you run?”

“Run? As in, with my legs?” you replied. “Maybe not currently, but after my child is born I can—”

“Like prey,” she supplied, fixing her unsettling gaze on you. “Run and hide, never let the children catch you, can you do that?”

“I—uh, yes, I—um,” you swallowed, thinking arrogantly at the time that surely you could do anything she asked. 

“Good,” ‘Father’ sat back in her chair, not sparing you another glance, “you have your child, I keep the Fatui away, and then you let my children hunt.”

“As long as my child has no part,” you reasoned.

“Very well.”

It’s been a good run. Marcotte Station is your longest stay to date—three years, to be exact. Almost four. 

It feels like home. 

‘Father’ had been gracious enough to make the children of the House wear an enchanted flag detectable by elemental sight when they ‘hunt’ you so that you may at least be able to realize when you were in actual mortal danger—though you sometimes wonder if there is any difference between being hunted by the House for fun and being hunted by Fatui for a bounty. But ‘Father’ stayed true to her word, the Fatui never reached you in Fontaine.

You were sloppy initially, the twins were only a few months old then. You had narrowly escaped a then-young Chapleau (you believe that was his name) when you sheltered in Poisson as your first attempt at hiding. Your wards were barely wards then, more like dendro tripwires haphazardly strung around your small abode of rusty metal. If it were not for Hugo’s sharp young nose, you might not have grabbed the twins in time. 

In hindsight, you think Chapleau had let you have a head start. Anyone would be able to hear colicky twins in the echoing cavern of Poisson from miles away. To your credit, you didn’t know you were having twins when you agreed to this whole hunting business. 

Now, your wards not only extend to cover the better part of the mountain behind Marcotte Station, but you’ve learned to enchant the cottage to be virtually undetectable as long as you are within its vicinity and there is greenery to blend into. You had tested it out with passing hunters in smaller scales until you were able to build up to the size of that cottage and the method hasn’t failed you yet. Though, this means that you need to get back before the hunter finds you.

Fastening your satchel to your chest, you break into a sprint. 

The ward was tripped five seconds ago, westward. They shouldn’t have zeroed in on your presence yet, but they will soon—depending on who exactly is out today, you have three to five minutes to get back to the cottage before they can catch sight of you and render your dendro illusion useless. It hasn’t escaped you that your powers function much like how faerie magic is described.

Your thighs start to burn with the force it takes to bring you uphill, but you’d rather have sore legs the next morning than have to uproot your entire life once again. It wouldn’t be good for the twins. 

The second time you were caught was by a young girl whose name you did not know. The twins were almost a year old and you had tried to settle in the plains behind the Court of Fontaine after flitting about, not being able to find a spot safe enough from monsters that would allow you to set up. She had caught you in the middle of breast-feeding, an inconvenience, but all part of the game. 

By then, you were able to lay dendro traps that stayed for days and you were able to escape thanks to that invention. How you wish you’d put them in place here, but the enchantment held up so well that having traps would only tip hunters off that you were nearby.

You finally crest the hill, and you feel the enchantment fall back into place. You’re halfway through a sigh of relief when you feel water whizz past your ear and an arrow of hydro is embedded in the ground before you. Shit, you thought none of the vision-holders were allowed to hunt—and they gained on you faster than any other hunter ever did. Either they’ve gotten better, or you’re dealing with someone new.

You break away from the cottage, running in the other direction so you’d get far enough from the hunter to find your bearings, but not far enough for the illusion to wear off. Not a moment later, another arrow flies narrowly past your head and that inspires the muscles in your legs to propel you forward just that little bit faster.

Shit, shit, shit. You can outrun them, lead them away from the house without incident and return later—but the twins are sick. 

You’re going to need to write a strongly-worded letter and leave it in your pigeon hole the next time you’re in town; you thought vision holders were out of the equation. If the hunter uses their elemental sight, it would be over. Maybe they already did and that’s how they found you.

You reach the safety of a towering tree and round the thick trunk. The hunter is running through high branches, you think. If the fair folk of this mountain are as potent as legend makes them out to be, it would be high time for them to show their true potential today. Maybe you need to lure the hunter into shooting a rowan tree or something of the sort first. 

When a moment passes and there is still no magical thudding of a body onto the forest floor, you take it upon yourself instead of wishing on the fae. It’s a risk, but you close your eyes, using the intricately woven net of your dendro wards to pinpoint the location of the hunter. 

“Cheeky!” a male voice sounds from the edge of the clearing, and he coughs.

Shit, he could detect that?

Your concentration is broken and you still do not know where he is, but that question does not hang long in the air because you eat shit before you could figure out what to do next. You’re pressed to the floor, the hunter’s knee digging into your back and you can’t help but shiver.

You send a puff of dendro spores behind you and the hunter sputters. You take advantage of his loosening hold to press your palms to the floor and flip to face him—though you are barely given the chance to get a good look as a blade of rushing hydro is on your neck in an instance. You feel its spray against your skin and you freeze, taking note of your attacker. 

All but his eyes are masked, but he is certainly too tall and well-built to be a child. 

He stares at you with exhilarated eyes, but they border more on surprise the longer he does. They’re haunting, like the striking blue of your twin’s eyes—but if theirs were like an ocean that glistens in the moonlight, his are an uncanny, unreflecting pool of the deepest azure. No, it can’t be him. It wouldn’t be.

Despite his unwavering gaze, his hold on both you and the blade is precise. This cannot be a child of the House of the Hearth, and yet he wears their hunting flag. 

And here comes the dilemma you’ve tried to bury behind years of honing your traps and wards: what happens when you are actually caught? 

You suppose that part of the hunt is the killing, and why would that be different only for this strange set-up? You’re their white stag, almost six years of the chase and now the hunting party has closed in on its coveted quarry. 

A white stag is what folklorists call a ‘motif’, a recurring theme in folk literature. They appear as symbols of purity, or to forebode a change in the story—killing them brings honour in some stories, bad luck in others. You just hope this story falls into the latter category, and the change in story is something like you getting away from this hunter. Though, with how he’s handling you, you doubt that’ll be the case. 

In all honesty, you don’t think you’ve been a good mother. What sort of mother agrees to a deal like this? In hindsight, you don’t know if all this was worth it. You know they would not harm the twins, but what would the twins do without you? Even if you needed the protection of ‘Father’ and the monthly stipend, was this decision fair to them? There were only five years left; you curse yourself for not having lasted longer.

“Hugo,” you choke out. You pray that the dog hears you before you’re killed.

Something shifts in the hunter’s eyes and the pressure on your neck lessens; you breathe easier. When the blade previously pressed to the column of your throat lifts off of you completely, you wonder for a second if you were being too dramatic; perhaps ‘Father’ is more merciful than you thought her to be. Regardless, this is a chance. 

“Hugo!” you scream with all your might, knocking into your attacker. You scramble up and the sight of the mass of white fur sprinting towards you almost brings you to tears. Maybe letting him learn to open doors wasn’t a bad thing after all. 

There’s something wrong, though. The hunter is awfully fast, deft and skilled in a way you have never seen any of your previous hunters be able to achieve before—yet he hasn’t caught up. You glance back at the clearing, and the hunter sits on his knees, those same haunting blue eyes boring into you still. That’s when you see it, the fiery hair that peeks out from under his hood.

No.

You don’t know what compels you, but you speak. One word, one damning word.

“Ajax?”

Chapter Text

He knew you weren’t dead.

That dendro power; so unique he would know it blind. His skin thrums with the memory of it in the times where he would wake up in a cold sweat, Sigils of Permission swirling in his vision and the faintest smell of incense at the tip of his nose. 

Ajax is a Harbinger for good reason. He is a finely tuned weapon, the Tsaritsa’s most loyal dog. That is to say, finding you was light work. 

After listening to Heloir’s recounting of the past activities of the ‘witch’, he deduced that you were somehow hiding in plain sight. You wouldn’t go back to the Belleau or the Court of Fontaine Regions, and areas like Liffey and Morte seemed too small and dangerous anyways. That left Ajax traversing Beryl Region and Erinnyes Forest, and he found you before he moved onto the Research Institute. 

It was you yesterday. That fact solidified as soon as the spores hit him, as soon as you turned around and he saw your face; Ajax is so sure of it he could draw the shape of you into the sky. It took him an embarrassingly long time to act, out of pure shock. Your voice and an unfamiliar name is what snaps him out of his reverie. 

A part of him thought those nights that he was roused out of sleep by your sweet honey voice finally caught up to him, that he finally started to hallucinate your face everywhere he went. But here he is now, on his knees in the dirt, staring up at your very real, very frozen form. 

Your voice startles him, His name, his damned name. It feels like he just saw you yesterday—well, he did, technically, but that’s not what he’s trying to say.

Before Ajax could get up, a force that smells awfully familiar rams into and knocks the wind out of him.

“Hugo! Hugo, what are you doing?” you shout, exasperated, “attack him!” 

Hugo does nothing of the sort (at least not in the way Ajax imagines you’d want the creature to). The pale white dog—or what’s supposed to be a dog—licks his face, bounding about with a wagging tail. 

“Hugo!”

“Hey buddy,” Ajax says, turning his face away from Hugo’s enthusiastic kisses. 

“Why… how?” you breathe. 

“He’s an Abyssal dog,” Ajax shrugs, rubbing the soft fur of the thing.

“A what?”

“He’s touched by the Abyss, and he smells it on me.”

Wait, that’s not what’s important here.

“I—”

“Go back, Tartaglia,” you say. “Do not speak a word of this to the children, you’ll spoil their hunt.”

“What?” 

Ajax has never seen you like this, so cold. Granted, it has been years since he last spoke to you, and you have always been guarded. Yet something feels different now; perhaps something to do with him trying to drown your hometown six years ago, he wouldn’t know.

“I thought you were dead!” he says. 

He does not miss the shaking of your hands.

“Go,” you say resolutely.

“I tried to find you!” he reasons, “I looked everywhere for you.”

You do not reply and it bothers him. 

“You abandoned ship!”

You furrow your brows, finally speaking, “abandoned… ship?”

Uh oh. 

It’s an unspoken rule amongst the Fatui Harbingers that have they need for personal dealings, doing it through the bounty system can make things a lot easier. He thinks he just probably, maybe, definitely shouldn’t have put your name on his , now that he’s facing you.

“You put the bounty on me?”

“Wh—wait—”

“You drowned our—drowned my home!”

Our. Six years and you still said ‘our’ like it was an instinct.

“Listen to—”

“No,” you spit. “Go. Now.”

Ajax carried you with him these years, the golden necklace in his pocket still a reminder of that. Yet, when he thinks back on the day he came back to your splintered home, exhilarated from battle and havoc, he does not feel bitterness. He did not mean for things to end that way—perhaps he was too young and childish then. It was like in his heart of hearts, he knew, his soul sang to him knowing that its tuning fork would never be far.

He has found you again, and he will find you again, such is his fate. He will return to you as the tide to the shore, birds to their roost and a sword to its master; even if it is in dust.

“Heloir! Hey, little squirt.”

Ajax is elated when he returns to the House, tossing his bow aside as he flops down onto the floor and grabs a cushion.

“I’m busy Master Childe,” the girl says, sticking her tongue out in concentration. She pours an unknown powder into a jar of slowly bubbling green liquid that eerily reminds Ajax of what his mother used to give him when he had a sore throat.

“What else do you know about the witch?”

He toys with the frayed fabric of the cushion cover.

She rolls her eyes, “other than what you asked a thousand times?”

He hums noncommittally. 

“You’re lucky I didn’t poison your pillow,” she huffs.

What an eloquent ten year-old.

Admittedly, unleashing Osial from his prison just wasn’t a good idea. Ajax didn’t like the plan because of the very plain fact that it would have put thousands in danger, but the Tsaritsa is his god and he is nothing if not her loyal dog. It was supposed to be a mere contingency plan, anyway; a last resort. Besides, he would have defeated the watery lizard by himself if worse came to worse.

“She lived with us for a while,” the kid says absentmindedly, “and then ‘Father’ told us that we’d get to hunt her.”

Amidst it all, he met you. You and your stubborn heart, hard-headed to a fault, so wary of him that he almost found it endearing; though he supposes your instincts were not wrong. It was a simple case of a conflict of interest: he was tasked with unleashing a monster unto Liyue Harbour if he was unable to attain the Geo gnosis, and you just happened to be a citizen of the nation of Geo who helped him do exactly that. Falling in love with you was never part of the plan. 

“You caught her, didn't you?” the kid screams. 

Ajax jolts at her volume, grinning at the way hers fists clench comically with her seething. 

He shrugs, “you made it sound like it would be hard.”

“Did you see—” she seems to reconsider her words, grumbling something that sounds like annoyance under her breath.

Ajax raises an eyebrow, waiting.

“She’s really good,” Heloir huffs, “I’ll get her one day.”

It’s fine, Ajax has won you over before, he can do it again. He’ll go back and you’ll take him back because it is written in the very stars; he is sure of it. 

Bounty. A bounty. Your ex-lover had put a bounty on you. 

You’ve heard of the horrors. Obsessive stalking exes, slanderous rumours—but a bounty ?

Your nails are bitten to their beds, jagged and raw with anxiety. Ajax found you so easily, just like he was able to find you wherever you were in Liyue whether it was in ruins or atop mountains where you followed the trail of one old wives’ tale or another.

What would you have done if he had chosen to come on a day where the twins were not ill, where they were playing happily outside?

They are Sunday’s children, your twins. Sunday’s child is bonny and blithe and good and gay. You cried when you first held them, their tiny screaming little bodies, almost wishing that he was there, however much bitterness you still harboured. 

Their father is a Thursday child; Thursday’s child has far to go, as they say. You suppose it’s fitting that the Thursday line is the only one out of the entire nursery rhyme taken to mean either greatness or doom; you aren’t entirely sure of the answer either. 

Your children are bonny and blithe, just the way things are. There is no need for anything else; not for him nor the world. 

You watch them play with a solemn smile, urging Milena to polish off the rest of her plate of sunsettias before going to wash up for bed. You consider moving, but upheaving everything you’ve built is a thought that sits wrongly; you can’t bear to distress them. Besides, it’s been a week and he hasn’t come back. 

Somewhat less importantly, that treacherous, shameless dog—or Abyss dog or whatever the hell Ajax called him. Hugo has been staring out the windows with longing ever since his meeting with the Harbinger, like a wife whose husband has not yet returned from war. You ought to cook him for his betrayal.

“My loves,” you say gently, and you smile at the adorable tilt of the twins’ heads, “let’s go to sleep now, okay?”

Milena stuffs the last slice of apple in her mouth and Nikolai leaps off his chair, challenging his twin sister to one of their many little competitions.

“Hugo!” your voice startles the dog from his place on the couch that flanks the window with the view of the clearing in front of the house. “Let’s get ready for bed.”

The dog has the audacity to huff, trodding past you and waiting at the bottom of the stairwell. You do wonder why you didn’t wonder sooner how he seems to understand everything you say; the damned Abyss dog. The anxious part of you thinks about how you’ve not been able to escape the tendrils of it, that void that follows the father of your children, it was right under your nose.

The twins chase each other, clambering up the stairs in fits of laughter in trying to see who could reach the top first and you watch with your arms crossed. Hugo dares huff again before he follows them and you roll your eyes, herding the disloyal dog up too.

Milena sleeps on the left side of the bed, and Nikolai on the right, every night without fail. You sing them the nursery rhyme instead of a bedtime story tonight.

“Why were we born on Sunday?” Nikolai asks when you finish, his voice half-drowsy with the pull of slumber that his sister has already succumbed to.

“Hm,” you say, “that’s a difficult question, you were almost born on Saturday.”

“Saturday? Why?” 

Milena stirs in her sleep, and you smooth a gentle hand over her hair. You watch Hugo open the door with his snout and pad outside.

“I don’t know,” you say, watching Nikolai’s eyes slip closed now. “Maybe you both wanted to wait in my tummy a little bit longer, and that’s why you were born on Sunday instead.”

“How did we get in your tummy?” 

Well shit, how do you answer that?

“Uh—well—um,” certainly not like that. 

“Were you in love?” he adds, basically half-asleep now. “Milly says babies are from love.”

Would it be fair to give that kind of false hope to a child?

“It doesn’t matter if I was,” you laugh softly, “go to bed, okay baby?”

“‘Kay, love you mama,” he replies, finally drifting off to sleep. 

You smile, bending over to place featherlight kisses on their foreheads, giving Milena’s hair one last stroke before you get up. You sit on the edge of the bed, watching your beautiful babies sleeping soundly and you sigh. 

Their little noses remind you of a bygone era in Mondstadt that housed a generation of bards who sang about the innocence of children, how they are kissed by heaven and slowly lose that light as they are marred by the world as they grow older. You make a silent promise to them, as you do every night, that you will shield them from all the cruelty of the world. They will not lose their light.

Hugo barks from downstairs and you jolt out of your trance, padding as quietly as you can out of the twins’ room. 

A bright green light flashes from outside when you descend the creaky wooden stairs. 

The qilin. 

You thank your lucky stars that your life and the twins’ sticks to a neat schedule; they will always be sleeping at this time. Breakfast, bathtime, a walk, studying and skills, lunch, playtime, a nap if they need it, then dinner, play again, bathtime, and bedtime. Clockwork.

Before you even step towards your foyer, a knocking pattern sounds at your door, so familiar you might scream, and your head floods red with anger. You are frozen by indecision. 

“Aw, you really don’t recognize me?” that dreaded voice sounds from the other side of the door.

If anger was tangible, you would have already caused a catastrophic event with the way the emotion courses through you like the ingredients of an explosive. 

You finally swing the door open, marching right into the unwanted visitor and causing him to stumble back down the porch steps. His eyes are wide with excitement and it makes your anger flare.

“I told you to leave,” you say in a hushed voice, glancing warily behind you. 

“Why are we whispering?” he responds in a conspiratorial whisper. 

You think you could actually throttle him right now.

“C’mon, you didn’t think I’d let you go that easily, did you?” he says loudly, and you’re so concentrated on trying not to knock out his teeth that you can barely respond. 

There’s also the fact that you wouldn’t know what to do if one of the twins woke up—Celestia forbid it’s Milena and she thinks it’s a papa. Hell, Celestia forbid Ajax sees one of them. There would be no mistake, their copper-tinged hair, their striking blue eyes, so much like a photograph of him in his youth. He is not stupid.

“You killed my qilin,” you seethe. 

Ajax juts out his bottom lip in contemplation and you will yourself to look away from the habitual action. 

“Is that what they were? Looked a bit like spinocrocs to me,” he says casually. 

You’ve forgotten how irritating he is when you aren’t blinded by infatuation for him.

“Leave,” you say through gritted teeth, once again shooting another quick look towards the stairs. It had taken you weeks to build the chimeras, and it will leave you without any line of defence at night now that they’re gone.

Ajax’s mouth curves into that damned mischievous smirk of his, leaning against your threshold. He has not changed.

“Let’s fight,” he says suddenly.

Fight? Is he trying to get on your nerves?

“You’re going to have to identify yourself next time, Ajax,” you once said to him. 

There was a house at the edges of Liyue Harbour that you dreamed of. It was situated by the sandy coastline and if you lived there, you would wake to the lapping of the ocean and birdsong, brew tea accompanied by perfect silence and play the èrhú on the veranda under the silver gaze of the moon. He had bought it for you barely a month after you first confessed your want of it to him.

Despite its relative safety, you wired a dendro net above the front door in fear of intruders (though those fears never actually turned out to be realized) and when Ajax had first come in the dead of night, you had a knee-jerk reaction that pushed you to release the net.

He wasn’t harmed, of course, honed instincts of a warrior and all. You glanced at the sad sprawling net and nudged it with your foot. 

“How about this,” Ajax sidestepped the ropes, embracing you so naturally you could only foolishly wish for a lifetime of it. 

He kissed you just as easily and reached his knuckles out to the threshold, knocking a pattern into the wood that would soon become the sound that made your heart flutter in anticipation because you knew it was him who came to see you.

“Mm,” you hummed into the kiss, breaking away a hair’s breadth, “and perhaps you should kiss me like this, every time.”

He kissed you once more, grinning, “yeah?”

You smiled, “yeah.”

“Alright, I’ll have to make good on it, then,” he said, and then he kissed you again.

“Why are you here in the middle of the night?”

“Can I not see my lover whenever I want?”

Your face had twisted in an affection that you failed to restrain, and he grinned all the more for it. He nuzzled your cheek, smiling face against your skin.

“Getting shy on me, lovely?” 

He would be the death of you, you thought. 

“Come here,” he had said, nipping the tip of your ear with his sharp teeth, “let me make you feel good.”

Would it really be so horrible a fate?

Fate is a cruel thing. 

You’ve gotten stronger, Ajax feels it, and it is entirely too cruel that only now has fate allowed him to discover the fact.  

“Let’s fight.”

Okay, maybe that’s not the best thing to say to his ex-lover who is very visibly pissed at him, but what could he do? Ajax covets strength, and if you’ve gotten stronger over the last five or six years since he parted with you, he needs to know exactly how much. 

“Fuck off, Tartaglia.”

That’s new, you were never prone to such vulgarities.

He licks his lips, anticipation dancing in his eyes. It’ll be just like the old times, him provoking you and you pretending that you aren’t endeared by him, eventually giving into his every whim anyway. He has that effect on people—perhaps that is why many call him the Tsaritsa’s lap dog. 

“C’mon comrade,” he jeers.

Your eye twitches. 

“Maybe you’ll be able to beat me.”

A flare of your nose and Ajax is upside down, suspended from your porch awning by snaking green vines of curling dendro. 

Something stirs enthusiastically in his gut. 

You’ve never used your vision offensively with him, only really laying traps and using it to stall enemies that you’re running away from. So, it is entirely his oversight when he is flung witlessly across the clearing and lands with an ‘oof’ against the thick trunk of a tree. 

You’ve changed, Ajax smiles.

You trail angrily after him (albeit gracefully, as you always are), stopping with alarmed eyes when he starts coughing uncontrollably (yeah, that hasn’t quite gone away yet). Just when he thinks you’re showing concern for him, you muffle him with your hands, glancing back again behind you—why do you keep doing that?

“Will you keep quiet?” you scold. 

Ajax’s coughing fit continues until he is able to string together coherent words again.

“Talk to me,” he pleads, a hint of hope that betrays his otherwise challenging gaze.

“No,” you reply curtly, letting go of him as if his touch burned, “leave.”

“Please,” he says, and he sees how the sincerity in his eyes makes your resolve waver. “I’ve missed you.”

“Missed me?”

Ajax nods from his place on his ass against the tree.

“Did you miss me when you sent people to kill me?”

“I didn’t send them to kill you!”

“Be quiet,” you chide once again, and once again you glance back at the cottage behind you.

“What’s up there?” he asks, and you are startled back into looking at him. “You keep looking up.”

“Domovyk,” you say quickly, “hundreds of them.”

He hums in acknowledgement, “not brownies?”

“No,” you say. 

As if noticing that you let your guard down for a moment, you resume the displeased furrow of your brows. Something in that reminded him of his mother when he does something to upset her but she can’t help finding her own son adorable; Ajax wonders if you have always been capable of such a motherly expression.

“C’mon,” he pleads again, “I’ll be returning to Snezhnaya soon anyway, let’s catch up.”

“No,” you say with finality, “goodnight.”

With that, you turn on your heel, stalking back towards your cottage and leaving him still on his ass at the edge of the forest.

Huh, not as easy as he thought it would be.

Ajax smiles, thrumming with excitement.

Chapter Text

Nikolai does not want his mama to cry. 

Ever since you came back from gathering herbs that one afternoon, you seem to be bothered by something. You always say they’re too young—but Nikolai wants to help! Perhaps he ought to find those legendary swords you tell him stories about. Once he finds one, he can wield it and protect his family; you will never have to be sad again. 

He watches you lather soap onto Milena’s hair, the sound of the foam rubbing against your gentle fingers. You have been even quieter today, yawning all the time.

“Mama,” he says.

“Yeah, Niko?” you hum, cupping some water from the bath and pouring it over the crown of his sister’s head, emulsifying the soap to make the bubbles even bigger. 

Nikolai is very fond of water. He loves bioluminescence at the beach, but he also loves the element in general—you call it Hydro; water magic. He likes that it washes things away, that it can be warm or cold, that there are cute sea otters in the ocean and ducks in the ponds.

“What’s the really important sword?” 

You look over to him, “which one?”

“In Mondstadt,” Milena supplies in his stead, picking up the rubber blubberbeast floating in front of her.

Nikolai nods. It’s the sword wielded by one of Mondstadt’s most iconic heroes.

“The Eagle of the West Wind?” you ask, “Aquila Favonia.”

“Yeah!” he brings his hand down into the water to create a huge splash, earning a look from Milena and a light scolding from you.

“What made you think of it, Niko?” 

“I wanna find it,” he affirms, “I wanna be a knight, or a Millelith!”

“I wanna know why we don’t go out,” Milena huffs.

Even more so, Nikolai is fond of the music of water, the way it moves and sings. Aside from sword-fighting, he’d like to be one of those really cool people in Fontaine who get to act in plays or sing in operas or dance in ballets. Learning to use a sword seems like it would be much like learning to dance, fluid as water, and Nikolai is so fond of dancing and music. 

Nikolai watches your brows furrow, “why are you saying this suddenly, Milly?”

Milena frowns, not looking at you or her twin, “I wanna go outside.”

“We do go outside,” you say. 

“No!” she huffs again, “I wanna go outside all the time.”

“Why can’t we go outside mama?” Nikolai adds, curious himself.

If he could, he’d like to go into the city all the time and watch those people who perform their instruments on the street for hours, perhaps he’d even showcase his skill with the èrhú himself for some pocket money!

“Well,” you say gently. “There are a lot of dangerous things outside.”

“But you take us outside,” Nikolai says. 

“And Auntie Olga is always outside,” Milena adds.

That’s right, they get to meet their Auntie Olga sometimes when you take them into the city (she was there when they were born!). Nikolai isn’t sure how familial ties work that well yet, but Auntie Olga seems to be someone that you take a lot of comfort in just like he does in you—so he thinks that she must be family.

“That’s right,” you reply, reaching over and tapping his nose, leaving a dollop of foam. “But that’s because I know when it’s safe, and Auntie Olga is an adult too.”

“Is it because of your magic?” Milena inquires.

You nod with a small laugh, “yes, Milly.”

“Does Auntie Olga have magic?” Nikolai pipes up. “I want to have magic too!”

You smile, “maybe when you’re older, Niko.”

No matter, Nikolai doesn’t need to have magic to get a cool sword and protect his family. Perhaps he’d be like the hero you’ve told him stories about, Perseus. But that would mean that his father is a god—he isn’t sure how he feels about that notion yet.

“So, littluns,” you pause, “you have to promise to be good and listen to mama, okay? That’s the only way I can protect you.”

Nikolai furrows his brows, committing himself to his resolve. He doesn’t need you to protect him, he will become the sword and shield to protect his family. He wonders whether he can even get one of those metal things, the vision you always wear on your belt, too—it would make him look so cool. Once you are safe and sound, you can teach him even more songs on the èrhú and he will show you how well he dances and hopefully you will be able to smile all the time.

Nikolai does so love it when you smile.

That night, after you tell them a story and kiss each of their foreheads goodnight and gently leave their room, Nikolai opens his eyes and turns to Milena, bedsheets and blanket rustling with him.

“Milly,” he whispers.

“What?” she whispers back, turning to face him.

“We have to help mama,” he says.

“How?”

“I have to get stronger,” he proposes. 

“I think we need to find our papa,” she pouts, though Nikolai cannot see her face because of the night. 

“No!” he admonishes, “I’ll protect us.”

“But a papa will love mama,” Milena reasons. 

Nikolai ponders this, “that’s true—we have to do all of them.”

“You’re right,” she responds. 

“Promise?”

“Promise.”

The twins link their pinkies together, vowing their own roles in making their dreams come true, and they doze off hand in hand as the waves of slumber wash over them.

Stupid Ajax and his stupid puppy-dog eyes. 

The same thing happens again three nights after his initial visit. You are sitting at the small kitchen table practicing calligraphy on paper you made out of bark from nearby trees when you hear that familiar pattern.

“Why are you in Fontaine?” you ask when you find him standing bashfully on your porch.

“It’s a long story—one best told over a nice cup of tea,” he offers.

“You are a fool,” you say.

Your fool.

“It started with me getting arrested—or more accurately, I was falsely accused of the serial murders of a bunch of women who went missing when I was, like, seven. As if I would do such a thing as serial murders!”

You give him an unamused look.

“That’s so boring!”

Your unamused frown intensifies. 

“I meet my opponents on battlefields, I don’t resort to back-alley methods like vaporization,” he rolls his eyes. “But I digress—I served time in the Fortress of Meropide, drowned in the Abyss and fought the whale from my dreams for months.”

Your frown drops into concern, and you give him a once over.

“You were back in the Abyss?”

He smiles with a shrug.

“So?” he says.

“So what?”

“Will you give me a chance?” he says. “Just talk to me.”

You purse your lips. You have always been too weak to his honesty. 

“Fine,” you say, and when he opens his mouth you add, “but we stay outside.”

He pouts, but concedes, and you take a sharp breath before finding your seat on the porch stairs. The bench would feel too intimate, too permanent. 

He tells you about his adventures, the Traveler, Liyue, anything and everything. Your lips tug into a smile when he tells you that Teucer rejected his first confession from a schoolmate, and that Tonia and Anton are equal in height now, that he paid for renovations three years ago and now there are guest bedrooms in his house.

Ajax knows you enough to know not to prod you to speak. He seems content to just have your company and you push that thought away and steel yourself against his natural easy charm. 

You are suddenly reminded of the iteration of vampires popularized by an old Fontainian author, the way he draws you in with his strong gaze. One particular book offered the idea that vampires possess the ability to charm humans into submission, having a hold over them and commanding them to their will. Your eyes go to his mouth as he talks about his mother’s scarf that he had burned when he was fighting the giant creature that terrorized Fontaine, searching for fangs. 

“You wanna kiss me?”

You furrow your brows, meeting his eyes with an unamused frown.

“Sorry, I shouldn’t be pushing my luck quite yet, should I?”

“There is no yet , Childe,” you state, “you will leave Fontaine.”

“Yeah,” he affirms, “but I’m not leaving yet.”

“I think you should go now.”

“What? But we were having fun!” he frowns, cocking his head. 

“Well, I would like to go to bed,” you say, standing up. 

Ajax pouts and it takes a lot in you not to want to kiss it away; muscle memory.

“Alright, but can I please come back?”

“No.”

“Please!” he puts his palms together and raises the praying hands up to his brow, bowing his head. 

You fight the urge to kick his shin.

“I’ll be good,” he says, “Harbinger’s honour.”

You do not dignify that with a response.

“I’ll be gone in two weeks, just let me see you every few days, please?”

It’s been a long time since you’ve seen him, but you still know better than anyone that his stubbornness will win over in this conversation eventually. He will come back even if you turn him away, and you’d rather be in control if that were the case. You are not sure what you would do if he were to happen upon the twins by virtue of his random whims.

It’ll only be two weeks, won’t it?

“Fine,” you sigh and he grins, “but on my terms.”

“Anything,” he says. 

“Only come at this time, no earlier,” you say with severity, “and leave when I tell you to.”

“Of course,” he beams, “I’ll be back in two nights.”

He hops off the steps and gives you a salute, walking off at a leisurely pace with a small wave into the black Fontaine night. 

You get inside, locking your door and heaving a heavy sigh. It will be a lengthy two weeks.

Ajax has not found what he has come back to Fontaine for, but he arguably found even better, so maybe it is not all bad. Abyssal investigations could always wait.

He remembers being there, in the Abyss, the first damp breath he took when he was inside what felt like the warm belly of something bigger. He had put his hand out around him when he felt a wall that felt like the wet tongue of a dog, using it to prop himself up, picking a direction to walk aimlessly towards. 

He doesn’t know when his master found him, she wasn’t his master then. The Abyss felt a lot like falling, constantly.

In the language of a fourteen year-old, he had hope. Hope for what, he isn’t entirely sure now, looking back, but he distinctly remembers the spark of something in his chest that refused to go out. An eternal foolish flame that powered the muscle and sinew of his limbs and allowed him to ignore the gnawing ache in the pit of his stomach which sang of hunger and dread. He missed the sun.

He learned quickly that he should not sing, and that was difficult for an awkward child reared on stories of great heroes. He learned that he should barely be audible in the first place as he moved through the void; Skirk had noticed that when she first found him. Whether she saw potential or took pity on him, she taught him to hone that skill, to breathe as if he were not alive. Next came footsteps, each one too loud, too heavy . His gangly limbs and awkward teenage feet were the first to give him away to the Abyssal creatures that lurked in the crevices and folds of time and space, ones he wasn’t even sure were there or not, ones that could not even comprehend his existence as anything living. 

He remembers living in the bosom of a giant beast that Skirk had made him kill before she left on a journey to Tsaritsa knows where. He had stumbled around trying to skin and disembowel it, extracting what he hoped was blubber for his master. 

As he waited for the corpse to dry out so he could seek refuge in it, he boiled the strips of fat just like he used to watch his mother do in the spring after the villagers of Morepesok went whaling, fashioning all manner of tools out of the body of the creature. He hid in its skin and strung up garlands of mementos across its ribs as if it were a roof; talons or statuettes left behind after a battle. He slept in the safety of its skull for however long he was allowed a reprieve from the monsters looking to feast on the cadaver. That was his fortress, the castle over which he presided.

That knack for homemaking almost took his left arm when he had left a blubber-made candle on for too long and attracted a pack of rifthounds.

After that, he lived for thrill. Whatever skill he had, he sharpened them for the sole purpose of besting a beast, a mage, a Herald, a Lector. The bigger his opponent, whether in size or in number, he felt exhilaration down to the sharp points of his teeth. He learned like his master did how to survive on bits of mysterious meat and ten-minute increments of sleep a day. 

She had told him that the Abyss chose him. Ajax didn’t believe in providence. 

One day (though the concept of days did not hold in that void), he took a step into what he thought was a pond to rouse the serpent creature that slept within, and then the next moment he was squinting up at the sky that did not exist where he had just been spat out from. It looked smaller than he remembered.

He does not recall feeling relief. 

In fact, as the search party crowded around his aching body, all he could think of was the sky. The aching blue of it, the azure that demanded him to look, to bear witness. He remembers the sun that beamed and warmed his freezing face as he laid amongst the snow of Morepesok’s mountains. 

One night, years after he had come out of the Abyss, after the concerned watchful gazes of his mother and father that told him they knew he had changed, after all the havoc he wreaked in Morepesok. Years after his conscription and years after his instatement as the Eleventh, he laid on your bosom on a cool winter night in Liyue, in the house he bought for you, the space he made with you. 

“I exist,” you read, “I see the sun, and if I don’t see the sun, I know it's there. And there's a whole life in that, in knowing that the sun is there.”

A novel by a Snezhnayan author that his father loved, all nine-hundred-something dreadful pages of musings on passion and gods and the pervasive nature of evil; why you hadn’t put it down from page one was beyond him.

Though, when he heard those words in your voice, he had thought about that very azure sky, the sun that welcomed him back. Then, he glanced up at your face and there you were; radiant. There was a thrill in that, too. He kissed you then, inexplicably, uncontrollably he reached out and kissed you like he was seeing you for the first time. Like you were the sun, the sky.

He had thought about your graceful fingers when you penned characters onto soft paper, the way your mouth moved for folklore, how beautifully you played the èrhú with your band in the heart of your city. He thought about how his heart would flip when you fixed your honey gaze onto him, how your kiss roused within him a burning flame with each delicate press of your lips. How he wanted you so, wanted you still.

He recalls thinking that there’s a whole life in that, if he is allowed. 

Ajax did not find any trace of his master in Fontaine, but he found you again.

He bids the Traveler farewell at the coastline they stand atop and set off on his way. 

He needs to convince them to fight him again somehow. The battle at the Golden House still lives in his mind as one of the most exhilarating moments of his life despite finding all traces of his lover entirely gone when he returned from it, despite the hollowness left behind in the wake of your parting; entirely his fault. Yet it was there, the same thrill of that darkness.

But he has reason to stay now, a fight may be for a later time. Ajax grins, making his way to the Marcotte mountains.

Chapter Text

Ajax comes back again two nights after his initial visit, and the night after that. It feels just like it used to. What, with the way he would follow you around like a puppy and appear at your doorstep at his leisure.

“Brought you something,” he says this time, a paper bag in hand.

You furrow your brows in question, extending a steaming mug of apple cinnamon tea out wordlessly to him. Early spring nights are still cold in Fontaine, it should warm him up well. He takes the mug with an appreciative smile, getting comfortable in what has quickly become his spot on your porch bench. 

He takes a sip from his mug, placing the bag on your lap. 

“Here,” he says.

You take it, peering into the contents, “macarons.”

He nods, “you said you didn’t get them last time you went into town.”

You did tell him that, but he doesn’t know that it is Milena and Nikolai who adore the sweet treats.

He stares at you as he takes a sip of his tea, humming appreciatively. 

He used to come to your apartment, gather your books and calligraphy equipment and drag you out of the place with a beaming grin. He’d valiantly lay out a blanket on the ground and you would sit down with a disapproving shake of your head, continuing your work as if a beautiful man with wild fiery hair didn’t just bring you out into the middle of nowhere. 

“What do you want?” you say.

And that would be how you spent many of your days, you on a blanket in some random part of Liyue as the Eleventh of the Fatui Harbingers lugged some company of Abyssal creatures or a group of treasure hoarders into the clearing a few feet away, fighting them for his idea of fun. 

He’d prod you for ‘help’ as if he’d ever need it, wanting to see the true extent of your vision-wielding. Of course, you never said yes and he’d just continue his little rampage whilst you inked letters onto xuān paper. 

When he was in the throes of battle, Ajax moved like a skilled dancer, and you were an entranced audience member. When he was sufficiently satisfied by his escapades, a pile of groaning Abyss mages behind him, he’d come back to you. He’d lay his head down on your lap wordlessly, eyes asking for a story just like he’s doing now. You had foolishly hoped that that would become a habit; his return to you despite his want of the world.

“A story,” he confirms.

You sigh.

You didn’t mind it because he always made you feel safe. Besides, you loved the landscape of your nation, the mighty mountains, blankets of golden grass, and stretches of blue-green ocean. You were at home, whether it was the misty Qingyun Peak, the sea air of Yilong Wharf flanked by the emerald Mt. Mingyuan and even in the heart of bustling Liyue Harbour.

“What do you want me to tell you?” 

He smiles hopefully, and you can't help the endeared roll of your eyes. 

“Anything,” he says.

You swallow, “The White Duck, then.”

Childe tilts his head in that bashful curiosity of his. He looks older, more mature—but that glint of the boy who thinks he could conquer the world still remains.

“Once, a prince married a beautiful princess, but he had barely enough time to drink in her beauty, to listen to her soothing voice before he had to embark on a journey.”

He rests his elbow on the back of the porch chair, propping his head up with his hand.

“Before he left, he made her promise to stay inside whilst he was away,” you continue. 

Ajax stiffens. 

He remembers that day well, the way your voice sounded when you said his name. He remembers the way the sandbearer wood of your bedroom smelled, the fresh musk of the bedsheets and the ashes of incense in the burner atop your dresser. He recalls the sound of the waves lapping the nearby sandy beach that very morning and the melody of your beloved birdsong outside the window. 

“Ajax,” you had said. His name, just his name. You’d told him once that it was funny that he had multiple names, ‘it’s a good thing, faeries wouldn’t be able to play tricks on you that way’.

He had gotten up as quietly as he could, not wanting to rouse you from your slumber. You'd been so fatigued the past months then that he couldn’t help but dote on you closely every day, to your annoyance mostly. Besides, he did not need you to be outside on an occasion like that day; just in case. 

“What are you doing, Ajax?”

His damned name out of your mouth again. Your voice was groggy, the sky barely alight with the beginnings of sunrise in the frame of the wooden window behind you. You looked beautiful, like a painting the way you were shrouded in nothing but the bunched-up blanket in the morning’s awakening, skin bare and littered with his love; he could still feel it in his teeth. 

“Don’t worry, I’ll be right back,” he soothed, stepping towards you, but he stuttered when you shrank back. He sat on the bed, reaching out to embrace you, but once again you avoided his touch.

“Where are you going, Ajax?” your tone was accusatory, so foreign to him then. You pushed up off the bed to sit across from him.

He thought then about what he could do to stop you from saying his name, lest he succumb to the sticky honey of your voice. You looked beautiful still, hair still tangled with sleep.

“It’s nothing to worry about, just stay inside and I’ll be back.” 

This time you stayed frozen as he leaned over and placed a quick kiss on your forehead. 

“Stay right here,” he murmured onto your skin.

“Ajax,” you said, voice like a quiet plea. “Let’s talk—”

“We have all the time in the world for that when I get back,” he smiled, stroking your cheek.

You pursed your lips as you watched him get up and cross the room to close the window shutters in hopes that you’d be able to sleep for longer after sunrise.

“C’mon lovely, promise you’ll stay inside?” 

You only looked at him like he was a stranger then, but he had a thrilling battle awaiting him. 

“I love you, I’ll be back.”

With a quick kiss to your lips, Ajax left for the Golden House. 

“She did not listen, and was cursed to turn into a white duck by a witch who coveted the prince. She laid three eggs which hatched into three little ducklings, but the prince was oblivious when he returned and continued his life believing the witch was his wife. 

“Later, when he finds out the truth, he sends his servants to capture the duck but she evades them until it was the prince himself who came to find her. She turned back into a human in his palms, along with their three children, and the prince ordered for the witch’s dismemberment.”

He lets out a low whistle, huffing a weighted breath. This is by no means the same eloquence with which you used to tell fairy tales to him, usually adorned with pretty words and told to him in your enchanting voice. 

“What do you classify it as?” he asks awkwardly.

“It would fall under ‘The White and The Black Bride’, but Snezhnayan scholars use the term ‘The Transformed Wife’. It’s the same in principle, like the premise of Swan Lake.”

He nods, “I don’t have secret triplets or anything, do I?”

You choke on your tea. 

He backtracks, “I’m sorry, bad joke.”

You chuckle humorlessly. 

“Do you think we would have gotten married?” he asks suddenly. 

His mother was always keen on that idea, though he is unsure whether she is keen on seeing her son get married or the idea of her warmongering child being anchored somehow.

You laugh. He grins. You look away.

“Mama thought we’d get married, pop out a few non-duck kids and live happily ever after.”

You purse your lips, “as if.”

He knows what you’re thinking—a man with unbridled lust for battle would never settle down. You liked it, when he had his duties and you had yours, and you’d meet in the middle when time allowed. It worked, but it would be different if it was more than just the two of you. 

It’s a good thing that it is just you two right now, then. 

Ajax thinks that it could work again, that he could fall back into the routine as easily as he fell back in love with you the moment he saw you again; he never really stopped anyway.

A pause permeates the space between, accompanied by the gentle hooting of owls and the rustling of the giant trees that line the area of your home. 

“It’s late, I’ll leave you to go to bed,” he says, bringing his mug up to his lips and draining the contents. 

He leans over—naturally, as if he’s done this since the dawn of time—cups your cheek and kisses your temple. 

“I’ll be back, lovely, alright?”

You look like you want to tell him something, but you only offer him a wave as he takes off. 

It’s alright, Ajax can put his curiosity aside to give you time to come back to him; he knows you will.

You had already suspected that there was something amiss with your body. Your cycle had been late and stress was not quite a sufficient explanation for its delay. You remember that day well. You were planning to tell him that you had a suspicion, that you wanted to go to Bubu Pharmacy, but he was already leaving when you had slipped out of the embrace of sleep. 

The waves were singing their steady morning song and the chorus of birds was beginning to climb with the sun into the sky, finches and the cranes you so loved. You were going to tell him that morning.

“Ajax,” you said, watching him pad quiet as a mouse around your bedroom for his clothes.

He looked guilty when he turned to you, and something in your gut stirred.

“What are you doing, Ajax?”

“Don’t worry, I’ll be right back, lovely,” he had said. 

You had no patience to entertain his purposeful avoidance and half-truths; he should know that. 

“Where are you going, Ajax?” you did not like the hunger in his eyes.

“It’s nothing to worry about, just stay inside and I’ll be back.” 

This time you stayed frozen as he leaned over and placed a quick kiss on your forehead. 

“Stay right here,” he murmured onto your skin.

“Ajax,” you said. “Let’s talk—”

“We have all the time in the world for that when I get back,” he smiled, stroking your cheek.

Time. That’s right, you were in love with a man on borrowed time who believed he could have the world. It was almost funny, you’d think that your study of folklore would have warned you away from this type of story. 

You wondered if there were any other versions of this story. 

Your eyes followed him as he came back to you after closing the shutters; once again you foolishly hoped his returning to you would be a habit. 

“C’mon lovely, promise you’ll stay inside?”

You said nothing.

“I love you, I’ll be back.”

A kiss, and he was gone.

After he left, you went back to sleep. You are unsure, looking back, whether to count yourself lucky that you were one of the few who did not experience morning sickness, only being hit with extreme fatigue in the early stages.You had slept well into the day, only being awakened when ferocious winds rapped against your shutters.

You initially thought it a summer storm, something the monsoon season brought in. You woke up slowly, groggily, as if the very tendrils of sticky sleep were wrapped around your body and would not let go. You didn’t know it then, but this would be the type of fatigue that stayed with you until the later months of pregnancy, leaving you in bed for the better part of your days. When you finally got up, hands pressed to the cold sheets to steady yourself, the sound of the wind seemed even louder; it almost felt like a dream. You padded over to the window, throwing open the shutters and blinking harshly when a strong wind hit you. 

As soon as you saw it, you knew it was his doing, and you played into Fatui hands to cause the destruction of your own homeland. You shielded your eyes from the leaves and ocean spray, heart sinking as you watched the waters of Liyue Harbour churn as violently as the humiliation in your gut. You needed to get out. 

You packed as quickly as you could, breaking the chain of your favourite necklace and leaving it behind on top of your dresser out of spite. A bitter part of you had hoped that when he returned and saw the golden thing he gifted you, the one you never took off, he would think that you were dead; that he had killed you. 

With one last look back to the space your home once occupied, now splintered and drowning in the monstrous waters your lover raised against your nation, you ran.

A gesture. That’s how the people in theatre plays win back their lover; grandiose displays of love. He should know, he’s been acting in them for years.

Though that being said, Ajax doesn’t actually know how to talk to Arlecchino about it. ‘Hey, you know the witch that your kids have been play-hunting for five odd years? Yeah she’s actually my long-lost lover whom I’d tear through the world for, so could you maybe make them stop?’.

“Tartaglia,” the Knave levels him with a look that he’ll take as mild annoyance before she goes back to her papers. 

For all his ponderings, Ajax had made his way to her office quite fast. Here he is now, closing the heavy doors behind him and standing before the fourth Harbinger.

“The witch,” he says.

Formalities are for his sleuthing colleagues and Ajax is nary inclined to do things of the sort.

“Yes?”

“I put the bounty on her,” he continues. 

Arlecchino says nothing, her slender fingers wrapped around a quill, penning what he assumes is her ledgers. 

“See, we go way back—you remember what I did in Liyue, don’t you?”

He remembers the palpable fear he felt when he returned to find the home he bought for you in utter splinters. 

It was not supposed to happen, not like that, that was not how it was supposed to end. The only relief he had after many sleepless nights of looking for you was getting wind that there was a possible spotting somewhere near the Adventurer’s Guild, and though he had no concrete proof that it was you, he chose to believe that you were alive. 

The Knave sighs, “yes.”

“Well, see, she happens to be—”

“Tartaglia.”

“Yes—right,” he clears his throat. 

Ajax has never been good at all the diplomatic circumlocution his coworkers do; there has yet to be an obstacle he can’t fight his way through, after all (bless diplomatic immunity). Right now though, he curses himself for his clumsy words. 

“She’s my lover— was my lover,” he confesses finally. “I hadn’t seen her since my time in Liyue and now I meet her again all alone in the Fontainian woods being hunted by a bunch of kids.”

Something in the Knave’s eyes shift, if ever such a thing was possible, and she fixes her sharp gaze on Ajax. He cannot read her expression.

“I do not care,” she states plainly.

“You said you’d grant her protection until her bounty expired.”

“Yes, Tartaglia,” she responds, rubbing her temple.

“Well, if I lift that bounty, she’d be free, correct?”

“What exactly are you trying to say?”

“I love her.”

There it is.

“I do not care,” she says once again.

Well, he didn’t exactly expect her to, thank you very much. Is there even a beating heart inside that dark and mysterious stature? 

“I’m lifting the bounty.”

Silence.

“So you’ll have to call off the hunt, right?”

“My children need to learn.”

“A favour, then,” he says, albeit he doesn’t think she misses the slight desperation tinging his otherwise smooth voice.

Arlecchino pauses at this. 

“A favour from our Vanguard,” she croons. 

Ajax swallows. 

His coworkers are a motley lot, but they each have a penchant for cruelty and a ruthlessness unrivaled by any other he’s ever met. Favours owed between Harbingers can be deadly (he should know, he’s seen a few too many of the Doctor’s segments strung up across the intricate ribbed vaulting of Zapolyarny Palace; reminds him well to not mess with Sandrone). That is precisely why Ajax is one of the only three who refuse to make it their business to owe anything to their strange colleagues. Pierro because he’s Pierro, Columbina because she’s… well. 

And Ajax, because he values his life, and because he fights for the thrill of battle, of strength and glory. There is blood, but death is not what he seeks to sow.

“Very well,” she concedes. 

Okay, that was easy. Perhaps too easy. He feels as if she’s hiding something he should know; only a feeling, though.

Chapter Text

Brownies are Fontainian house spirits, coming out only at night to take up household chores around their respective abodes. They’re prickly little things, pranksters who deeply dislike lazy tenants. They are known in some areas of Snezhnaya as the domovoy, others as domovyk, and that iteration sees them as fiercely protective of the children and animals of their residence. You have a little diorama living room by the hearth dedicated to the hobgoblin, letting the twins take turns placing food offerings on the tiny end table next to the toy armchair you had sewn when you first came to this cottage.

You watch your twins in their seats, exchanging vareniki and licking the excess filling off their little fingers. You roll, Milena stuffs, Nikolai crimps.

“Milly, you’re spilling!” Nikolai admonishes as a drop of potato filling falls to the floor, then he adds in a whisper, “the domovyk will be mad.”

You laugh, only now really noticing that you’ve somehow taught them to use the Snezhnayan variant of fairytale creatures throughout the years. Even more specifically, the variants of the north-western area. You try not to think of wild fiery hair and a toothy grin.

You’ve never found any evidence of a little human running about your house, but stories often say they can turn invisible; ah the burden of proof. They’re a good excuse to make your kids clean up after themselves, though.

Once the misshapen dumplings are cooked with a generous lather of meat and onions, Milena takes the miniature one she made, trodding over to the tiny table by the hearth and places it on the plate fashioned out of the chip of an old vase. She smiles, satisfied as she ambles back to the dining table and takes her place next to Nikolai.

“Do you think the domovyk will like it?” you ask. 

“Of course!” Milena says, forking a hefty dumpling and shoving it in her mouth.

“Snesh-naya has yummy food!” Nikolai adds, taking a bite of his own share.

You grimace then. You couldn’t stand to alienate them from one-half of their souls so as to deny them knowledge about their father’s culture, even if they didn’t know him. The spice blend you use for so many recipes is Ajax’s babusya’s, the fairy tales you tell are iterations from his hometown; you often wonder if it’s your own fault that they yearn for something they don’t even know the magnitude of. 

“Hey littluns,” you say.

They turn to you in unison, heads tilting and cheeks stuffed. 

“Would you… if you could meet your papa,” you inhale, “would you want to?”

Milena wants a papa, Nikolai wants to learn so much more—they both do. You only need to hold it out for five more years, then they will be free. Things are fine this way, you shouldn’t have asked.

Milena nods vigorously and Nikolai shrugs.

“Can we?” she asks, eyes twinkling.

“I don’t know,” you reply.

“Why?” Nikolai says.

“I—um—I don’t know where he is,” you smile. 

Shit, shit, shit.  

That was a mistake. You shouldn’t have introduced the idea, you shouldn’t have given them any inkling of a man who even exists in the world whom they could call papa. 

Your twins don’t have anyone they can call family, save for your midwife who stayed with you in Fontaine. You helped her out with some of her work before the twins were born, and she was there with you as they were. She’s often traveling all over Fontaine, but you take any chance you can to see her on immunity days; you’ve often thought of her as the twins’ grandmother. Auntie Olga, they call her.

“Can we find him?” Milena pouts, and you reach over to wipe sour cream off her cheek.

“Would you be sad if we can’t find him?”

She considers this.

“I don’t want mama to be sad,” Nikolai answers, and Milena nods in agreement. 

“Well, I’m not sad,” you grin, “I have you two with me, you’re my whole world.”

The twins giggle, hopping off their seats and racing to give you a kiss on each of your cheeks. You scold them through smiles for leaving their plates without finishing dinner yet, and they clamber back up on their chairs obediently.

You do not say a word as you watch your twins finish off the rest of their vareniki.

Exhaustion has made a home in your bones. It’s not the same fatigue you felt those years ago when the twins were coming along, no. The exhaustion comes with a palpable, omnipresent anxiety knowing that you no longer have the qilin to protect you, that you are entirely defenseless as soon as the sun starts to set.

It was all well and good when you knew you had to take care of yourself to take care of them, but now that they are not literally attached to you, you are too preoccupied with their safety and care at the expense of yourself. It's the fiercely wanting of peace and safety that you are willing to sacrifice anything for it.

“You haven’t been sleeping,” Ajax’s voice startles you. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah,” you reply airily, clearing your throat and taking a sip of the night’s tea; vanilla and spearmint.

“I know you like the back of my hand,” he says, “what’s wrong?”

You survey him, a habitual bitterness stirring.

“I’m sorry,” he adds, putting a hand over yours in comfort, “I won’t push it.”

“It’s been almost six years, Ajax,” you say, pulling away, “a lot of things have changed.”

He stays silent, watching you.

“You killed my qilin,” you confess, “I can’t sleep without knowing they’re there.”

You made them because you were unable to detect the occasional wandering clockwork meka at night, leaving your defenses detrimentally open in your most vulnerable moments of slumber. They became very effective protection; at least until Ajax came along.

He furrows his brows, “can’t you just make them again?”

You remember that build up of heat in your throat, the drop of your stomach as the two equine creatures were injected with life. You had realized too late that it was your life force that they drew from.

Luckily, the twins were fast asleep when it happened, and you awoke at dawn in the same place you passed out in; Hugo pacing protectively around you. The qilin were just disassembling into organic matter for the day. 

If that was all, you wouldn’t be worried about going through the process again. 

No, once you had woken up, you were barely able to stand. There was a gnawing heat that ran its course through your veins, your head felt like the earth splitting, and getting back up the steps home proved to be a more difficult task than seeing straight—and you were seeing four Hugos, so that is saying a lot. The smallest sounds sent your ears ringing, and that discovery was upon hearing your twins’ voices. 

They were just over three years old, their vocabularies expanding and their penchant for asking why growing by the day. You had not known anxiety like that week. You could barely talk, for your stomach lurched each time you opened your mouth, and you were forced to relegate childcare to Hugo that first day. Then, the next day, the day after that, and the day after that, too. You don’t know what you would have done had there been no supplies or leftovers for your children, and had Hugo not been well-trained to rear them. 

“That takes time,” you say vaguely, snapping out of your thoughts. 

“But you’re safe up here.”

“Not from the hunters,” you rebut.

“Then why did you agree to it?” he prods.

“Because you damned Fatui are crawling all over the place.”

He scoffs, “Fatui?”

“Be quiet,” you scold.

He lowers his voice, scoffing again, “the people hunting you?”

You furrow your brows in disgust, “yes, Ajax, the people hunting me because of you.”

“I have nothing to do with the House of the Hearth.”

“What?”

A spark of realization in his eyes, “you don’t know.”

You shift unsurely in your place on the bench.

He huffs a disbelieving laugh, “you really don’t know?”

“Spit it out.”

“The House of the Hearth, the people you have the deal with, they’re Fatui.”

Your eyes widen, faltering ever so slightly. So, murderous children really aren’t just widespread in Fontaine after all.

“‘Father’ is fourth of the Fatui Harbingers, lovely,” he says, there is no humour in his tone. “The Knave, Arlecchino.”

You bite the inside of your cheek.

“I called it off for you,” he continues, “you don’t have to keep doing this.”

“What?”

“You can go wherever you want,” Ajax smiles, “I’m only sorry it’s taken this long.”

You scoff, “that wasn’t your decision to make.”

He looks taken aback.

“The hunt was how I made my living,” you add.

You don’t know what Ajax’s relationship to ‘Father’ is, but if she is truly a Harbinger, then you have once again gotten yourself entangled with dangerous people. 

Admittedly, getting out of the deal is best for your children. You’d be able to get them into school, take them into the city more often, perhaps even move closer so that they aren’t as isolated. You’d be able to take Nikolai to shows, maybe enroll him in dance lessons, and Milena could join the scouts and get a library pass. You could even invest in a stroller so they can stay out for longer; they’re always exhausted after only an hour or two of walking.

And yet, it’s something about his assumption that you needed his help.

“Leave, Ajax,” you say.

“Okay, but I’ll come back. I’m not going anywhere, okay?”

You give him no response as he leaves gently into the night.

Ajax does not understand your paranoia. You are a skilled vision-wielder and you’ve evaded capture for years, you’ve been entirely off-radar for three. He supposes he is to blame for putting a literal bounty on you, but come on, it’s the things you do for love!

Another deathly silent minute has passed since he arrived, three days since the argument he had with you. 

You gave him his cup of tea without sparing him a glance, taking your seat and having a sip of yours as you gaze into the dark forest. He watches you, the slope of your nose and the shape of your mouth, the way the stark night contrasts your red and white polkadot pyjamas. He laughs to himself at this observation.

“What?”

He stops abruptly, “nothing.”

You eye him and he almost stands to attention the way you remind him of a strict school teacher who is displeased with his disorderly conduct. 

“Your pyjamas are cute,” he says, hoping honesty will remedy the situation. 

You do not give any indication that you acknowledge his words, only take another sip of your tea. 

He should probably apologize.

“Were you able to get some sleep?” he chances the question that last set you off instead.

You sigh, “yes.”

He sees it then, the way your eyes close and you breathe in the chilly air, you are not on edge. At least, not as much as you were before. He smiles. 

“Will you let me inside before I leave?” 

He’s really pushing his luck, but you adore him, he knows it.

“Don’t push your luck,” you say. 

He chuckles, blowing on his drink before he takes a small sip.

“Next time,” you say. 

Ajax feels his heart swell like a giddy teenage boy’s.

“I have been meaning to ask,” you say suddenly, “how are your parents?”

He laughs at the severity of your tone. You’ve always been so serious, to his endearment.

He thinks of a photograph of you on his lap, taken at a photobooth imported from Fontaine during an autumn festival in Liyue. It sits now in a drawer in his mother’s living room because even though he told her that you had parted ways with him (an understatement, he supposes), she said she liked the way he smiled too much to bear destroying it entirely.

You would have gotten along wonderfully with her, he thinks. She adored you already, mentioning you in letters and asking after you in the rare chances he got to go home. You asked after her equally as often. Ajax thinks a part of his mother was clinging onto the humanness of her warrior-son having a partner. 

“Tato had surgery for his back a year ago,” he says, “he’s recovered well now.”

You nod knowingly, “what did he say about the no-fishing mandate?”

He tilts his head back in laughter, “‘you might as well kill me, doctor.’”

“And ma—your mother?”

Mama. That’s right, she told you to call her that in a letter she sent for your birthday.

“Mama had a go at me for daring to grow a goatee a while ago.”

He does not tell you that she still keeps a photograph of you and him at home.

“You did not,” you say gravely.

He chuckles, fixing you with a knowing look. You scan his face, and he chances that you are imagining that very picture that sent his mother into a rant that ended in him shaving that very same hour. You roll your eyes. 

“How is Zhongli?” you inquire.

“Great, actually,” he takes a sip of tea, “he’s finally gotten around to the concept of money.”

You laugh that rare laugh of yours and Ajax smiles.

“When did you last talk to him?” he asks.

You shake your head, “I don’t know.”

He swallows. 

You kept to yourself in Liyue, aside from the friends whom you played music with, and Zhongli who was a sort of mentor to you in matters of history and calligraphy. Ajax took that from you, he supposes, and he will do what it takes to reconcile his mistake.

“Do you want to go back?” he watches your eyelashes flutter closed in contemplation.

You pause, “no.”

Ajax decides not to push the matter further and leans back into the bench, his head lolling back as he stares at the ceiling absentmindedly. 

“I am happy here,” you say, and that was that. 

When Ajax returns two days later, you are ready to let him in. The twins’ shoes and coats are in the storage closet and their toys are kept neatly in chests out of sight. 

You decided to leave your income predicament for after he leaves Fontaine. You’d be able to take the twins into the city more often and they’ll be all the more happy for it and the guilty part of you wills it to be enough.

You hold your breath when he steps inside, scanning the space. Hugo does laps around his legs, huffing for attention that Ajax gives him through generous pets on his fluffy head. You guide him in, instructing him to take off his jacket to hang on your rack.

He snorts when he sees the diorama for the domovyk by the fireplace, before his eyes land and linger on the èrhú on the mantle as he shrugs off his jacket. He does not mention the fact that it is the one he gifted you years ago, and you do everything in your power to look away from the stretch of his muscles under the familiar burgundy dress-shirt.

“You still play,” he says softly, a statement rather than a question. 

“Yeah,” you say, “I do.”

His children play, too.

“Play it for me?” he says quickly, a glint of excitement in his face.

“No.”

Ajax blinks in surprise, as if he is pondering how such a small matter could change your entire demeanor. Whatever reason he thinks it is, he definitely isn’t thinking that there is a pair of twins upstairs who would wake up because of the volume and reveal to him that he has fathered two freckled, blue-eyed kids.

“What do you want to drink?” you say quickly.

“Sbiten,” he says, “I'll make it.”

When you take more than a few seconds’ delay to respond, he tilts his head and you are reminded of a waiting puppy.

“C’mon, it’s my first time in here!” he prods.

“I don’t have any alcohol,” you state. 

Ajax’s jaw falls wide open, “no alcohol?”

You roll your eyes. 

“No matter,” he huffs, “we’ll stay sober.”

You hold his gaze for a moment before you concede—and surely he foresaw that for he barely lets you utter your agreement before he hums, satisfied, bounding towards your kitchen and ducking slightly under the wood beam. You forget how tall he is sometimes. You watch him pause, jutting out his bottom lip as he surveys the worn wooden cupboards and tiled walls. 

“Didn’t know you had a knack for drawing,” he notes. 

Shit. A chill runs down your spine at your oversight—you’d gotten so used to seeing the doodles of flowers and bees and blubberbeasts painted onto the stiles and rails of each cupboard that you scarcely considered them unordinary, skipping over them entirely when you had gone to put away all of the twins’ belongings. They are very obviously done by children, now that you remove yourself from the shoes of an adoring mother; squiggly lines and abstract shapes.

You follow him, tapping his shoulder and pointing to the pot hanging from the small wrought iron rack on the wall. He follows your wordless order. A puppy. 

“It came with the house,” you lie, busying your hands with finding ingredients.

Ajax fills up the pot absentmindedly at the basin, “the plumbing seems good.”

You’d almost forgotten about his affinity for home-making. It’s so ironic you almost want to laugh; a man on borrowed time.

“Yeah,” you say, “we get lots of rain and I learned how to upkeep the cistern outside.”

You wince when you realize you had instinctively said ‘we’. You’ll just have to hope he assumes you’re talking about you and Hugo as a collective. 

“Still, it’s hard to believe kids used to live up here,” he says, setting the pot on the stovetop. 

“Well, I never—wood’s down there—met them,” you say, pointing to where you store fuel for the stove. 

Thanks to modern technology and the help of elemental magic, stoves and ranges are able to run on pyro power alone. Albeit, yours is quite an old model, so it still needs some kindling in exchange for the heat. Ajax opens the door to the grate and tosses a few logs in, along with some scrap pieces of paper you had set aside, he lights a match and throws that in, too, watching the fire enchanted by pyro consume the fuel. 

Adjusting the pot, he throws in his own measuring of cinnamon sticks, beads of cloves and a grating of nutmeg into the water and he turns to you, blue eyes twinkling in the warm kitchen light.

“Tell me a story, lovely,” he requests.

That nickname sends something in your gut aflutter. You can scarcely believe that Ajax is here in your own kitchen after six years, can still barely fathom the fact that he’s here in the first place. You hear your heart humming a soft song and it sounds awfully like the word ‘forever’, though a part of you burns with guilt for what you are hiding from him still. 

You purse your lips, “I’ll tell you about honey.”

He beams, and your heart sings. 

“Perfect,” he says and your pulse quickens.

You take your place beside him, letting your hip rest on the counter. He inches closer with the excitement that Nikolai and Milena have when you’re about to tell them a story and you cannot help your endeared smile.

“Honey isn’t ever the focal point of any folklore or myth,” you start, “but it is mentioned widely.”

His eager eyes spur you on to continue.

“I’m honestly more interested in honey as living human history than as a motif,” you look at the herbs drying on the wall across the small space of the kitchen. “Beekeeping has been around for as long as we know it, it’s probably one of the most ancient forms of cultivation.

“There have been all sorts of stories, though in Snezhnaya, there are a lot of ties between bears and honey. I read somewhere that it’s because honey is such a rich source of energy for bears and they like the bee larvae.”

“That’s why we call them vedmid, one who finds the honey,” Ajax adds.

His deep voice that only comes out when he speaks his native language inspires shivers down the length of your spine. 

You smile, “honey is believed by some to be the food of the gods—Sumerian desert folk believe that King Deshret’s tears dropped to the earth and bore bees, they even used it for embalming. It’s because honey is antiseptic. Here—”

You swoop down and open the cupboard behind you, getting on your knees to rifle through an abundance of jars and cans of food you’ve foraged and preserved. Ajax puts a concerned hand on the overhang of the wooden counter.

“Here it is,” you straighten up, showing him your ‘special honey’ as Nikolai calls it. “I harvested this a week ago, down where the mallow trees are—the hive was very kind.”

You grab a spoon quickly and dip it into the liquid gold, letting the excess drip off before you offer it to him expectantly.

Ajax pauses, looking between the outstretched spoon of glistening honey right before his lips and the upturn of yours. The corner of his lip twitches before he leans in, taking the spoon into his mouth, fixing his gaze upon your face as he swallows. 

Your eyes widen ever so slightly at the revelation of your sudden proximity. You can smell the scent of fresh ocean air and the bright citrus and warm amber accords that underpin his skin. You know exactly which shop in Liyue the perfume is from; he still smells the same.

He lights up, “it’s earthy.”

“Right? I use it to make medovik for—”

You somehow stop yourself before you say ‘for the twins’. 

And it’s then that you realize that you do want to tell him. You want to confess to him that through his loving you those years ago amongst the cuihua and sandbearer landscape of Liyue, two precious babies were born of it without his knowledge. And then that familiar bitterness of his betrayal stirs, but despite it all, you somehow still want him to know them, to love them as much as you love them. They are his as they are yours.

Ajax looks at you, waiting, and you clear your throat.

“I use it to make medovik, but not often,” you say, pretending that you’re correcting a momentary error in speech. You meant to say that you make it for their birthdays, and will do so again in a few months’ time for their sixth.

Ajax smirks, “my Snezhnayan ways rubbed off on you, huh?”

There’s an irritating creature in your chest, scratching at the column of your throat and filling your head with treacherous thoughts like ‘kiss him’. He’d taste like your honey, that sharp, almost bitter sweetness underlined by a unique fruitiness, combined with the earthy notes courtesy of the mallow trees flowering nearby the hive you harvested it from. You wonder whether his mouth would be just as soft, as warm as you remember, whether his arms snaking around you would feel like a homecoming.

Through your contemplations, his playful gaze melts into something more tender, and he bumps his hip against yours, rousing you from your thoughts. The perfume of kindling comforts you, the crackling of the building fire and his company. He begins feeling for something in his trouser pocket. 

You gasp when he dangles a familiar necklace in front of him.

“Here,” he says, extending the locket towards you.

You hesitate a small moment before taking the object, running your thumb over the three round noctilucous jade gems embedded in the engraving of a bundle of cornflowers on the gold surface. You had treasured it because both the flower and the gemstone shared in the brilliant colour of Ajax’s eyes; it was a gift from him. For a moment you again consider telling him about the twins, his twins asleep upstairs. 

“You kept it,” you breathe.

You open the locket, a water-stained picture of you and him smiling back at you.

“Of course I did,” he says easily, “I missed you every day.”

“Even though you thought I was dead?”

He laughs brightly at this, “I’m a natural optimist.”

You glance at him, his honest eyes and adorable freckled nose.

Your lips tug into a smile, “I think I’ve missed you a little, too.”

Ajax adds the honey into the pot once he deems it sufficiently boiled, following it with a globule of thick golden bulle fruit preserve. You hover near him, and he gravitates towards you naturally through the night. 

He will be away soon, you are merely catching up with an old friend. He does not need to know them because he will go away and it will break everyone involved; you cannot bear it.

You fiddle with the locket in your palm, three small round pools of glistening blue staring back at you. Ajax, Milena, and Nikolai. Fitting.  

Pocketing the necklace, you give him a smile, taking a sip of your cooling sbiten.

Chapter Text

A cold spell has overtaken the better half of this spring week in Fontaine. Obviously, it is no bother for someone like Ajax, but he worries after you. He wonders what you’d say about the cold, what manner of mythology explains random bouts of frost. He had gone out to buy marshmallows and a cozy blanket (which you already have an abundance of, he knows) and now ambles leisurely back to the House of the Hearth through the busy Fontainian streets. 

“Excuse me, Master Childe.”

He turns around, smiling, “Chapleau! What’s up kiddo?”

Ajax finds the children (however grown) of the House extremely endearing. He treats them the same way he treats his siblings; playful and doting.

“Ah, ‘Father’ asked me to give you this letter with a message,” the boy replies cautiously.

Ajax juts out his bottom lip in curiosity, “let’s hear it then.”

“She said that, um,” he hesitates, “that you have overstayed your welcome.”

“Ouch,” Ajax says, clutching his chest with his occupied hand and reaching for the letter with the other. “And here I thought we’ve become the best of friends.”

Chapleau chuckles awkwardly. 

“Thank you, kid, I’ll get out of your hair soon enough,” he says airily, walking past the boy into the warmth of the House. 

He sets his bags down once he returns to his quarters, organizing the contents so he does not forget to do so before he leaves to see you. He fishes out a letter opener from the pile of stationery on his desk and takes a seat on the edge of the wood. 

“A letter from the Tsaritsa,” Ajax muses. 

Come home, Tartaglia.

He grimaces. 

Now this won’t do. Not yet, anyway.

Ajax’s reverence towards the Tsaritsa is born of an awe of his Archon. A being so powerful, so devoted to her mission that all notions of morality come second to her cause; all is fair in love and war. He can respect her drive even if he is not always inclined to agree with her methods. Besides, strength and power seldom consider circumstance. 

He is her sword, and he shall be her best.

But alas, Ajax is still a free spirit. He still has so many questions for you, burning and nagging at him to voice them, and duty is nary as fun as doing as he pleases. 

Why are the four chairs around your dining table empty save for the one stockpiled with all sorts of things? Do you get visitors? Why do you seem to have so many things when you’re living alone? Why would you live so far up and out, when you could easily do away with better living? Do you not want to return to your hometown?

And then there is the unreasonable part of him that has questions like whether you are hiding a partner, whether you have moved on from him, whether you still have love for him the same way he has all of it and then some for you.

For now, he shall quell his questions and sink comfortably into the company of that love he still carries because it’s just you and him and the familiarity of your heart; the world can wait. 

Ajax comes bearing gifts once again, and you decide on hot cocoa as the beverage for the night thanks to the heaping bag of marshmallows. The twins will surely love them, too. 

You do not miss the way his eyes catch on the golden locket around your neck, an addition to the dendro pearls you always have on. He tells you that you look like a magpie. 

And then he grins, mirthful from his own joke, and you look away.

“Do you want cinnamon in yours?” he asks, cautiously pouring the steaming cocoa into two mugs. 

“Mmhm,” you hum.

That seems to give him pause, “since when?” 

You blink owlishly, cocking your head in question.

“You never liked cinnamon in your hot chocolate,” he says.

“Oh,” your mouth hangs open a moment, “it’s been a long time.”

You remember when you had first settled into Fontaine, belly just starting to swell and waking up one day with a downright violent craving for cinnamon rolls—it felt like you’d die without them. You bought many and consumed just as much, and then Olga started putting cinnamon in everything to stave off your cravings for the foreseeable future; she said it would be good for your health. 

Once they were weaned, the twins loved cinnamon in everything, but you were impartial when it came to the spice in hot chocolate until you started having to drink their leftovers, and cinnamon in hot chocolate just became the natural default.

Ajax shrugs in acknowledgement, rifling through your spice jars, He finds it and gives each serving a generous sprinkling before handing yours to you.

“Thank you,” you wrap your hand around the heating mug, blowing gently on the liquid.

You usher him into the living room, sitting down on your end of the couch and unraveling the soft woollen quilt he bought for you. He smirks when you stretch the cloth over his legs where he sits opposite you, and you tuck into the familiarity of his company as if it’s an instinct.

There is that voice again, the one that tugs at you to lean into him like the weeping branches of a tree, like the buds of a flower towards sunlight, the one that tells you to tell him. Take him by the hand, beating heart in your chest as you lead him upstairs and stand before the little room furthest left. You’d say to him, softly, that you need him to trust you, and then you would open the door and hold your breath. 

“The Tsaritsa has called me back,” Ajax says after a few minutes of idle chatter.

“Oh.”

And just like that, the bubble bursts. 

You were being a fool again, caught up in the momentary comfort of his companionship. Ignis Fatuus.

“When are you leaving?” you inquire.

Ajax smiles, leaning over and reaching a hand up towards your face, resting it on the nape of your neck and rubbing the skin of your cheek. It aches; your chest.

“Come back with me,” he says.

You furrow your brows, “what?”

“Let me take care of you,” he pleads, “I want to start over with us.”

“Ajax,” you breathe, brushing his hand away, “what are you saying?”

“I want us to be us again,” he confesses, “I want to take care of you, to keep you safe and make sure you’ll want for naught.”

“No,” you say staunchly. 

He is supposed to leave and never look back, to make the decision for you. 

“Why not?” he looks confusedly at you, setting his mug down.

“I have a life here,” you do the same, sitting up straighter. 

“And you could have one in Snezhnaya,” he reasons, “I’ll build you a house and I’ll return to you until the end of my days.”

Therein lies the kindling that sets any prospect of your children’s relationship with him ablaze. You know very well how unpredictable Ajax’s position is; he may be in Fontaine one day and Inazuma the next. If they know him, see him as tangible, you do not want them growing up missing their father and possibly, Celestia forbid, without him. 

“I am not willing to be your trophy wife, Ajax,” you spit.

“I never suggested that you would be—you could do anything you wanted,” he pleads.

“I don’t want to go with you,” you say.

“What? Why not?”

You scoff, “do I need a reason?”

“Well, it would be great to have one,” he says.

“What does it matter to you?”

“Because it’s about us.”

“Us?”

“Yes,” he says incredulously, “don’t tell me that you don’t want this?”

He searches your eyes desperately.

“You’re leaving,” you sigh, “there is no ‘us’, Ajax.”

Something in his gaze flickers and you do not want it to be hurt.

“Why? Do you have—” he huffs, “is there someone else? What could possibly be here that—”

“Mama?”

Your blood turns to ice.

“I’m cold,” your son says. 

Your head snaps to him in alarm. 

Nikolai stands at the bottom of the steps with his younger twin next to him, holding hands groggily with Hugo right behind them. You look back at Ajax who sits there in pure and unadulterated shock. You did not even hear them come down the stairs.

Shit, shit, shit.

“Mama?” your son repeats, staring at where you sit frozen.

“N-Nikolai,” you say, “come here baby.”

You wrench yourself off the couch, approaching where he and Milena stand unsurely at the bottom of the stairs. You pick him up, guiding his head to your shoulder and murmuring words of comfort into his coppery hair. You bend back down to scoop Milena up too and you thank Celestia that they are still little enough for you to do that. You know Ajax is staring, you know he sees Nikolai’s unmistakable blue eyes, the freckles dotted across his nose. You know he sees Milena’s, too, evaluating him. 

Ajax is nothing but observant; Milena is just like him in that regard.

“Who’s that, mama?” Nikolai inquires gently. Milena’s watchful silence alarms you.

Your papa. The beautiful man with wild fiery hair, the Fatui Harbinger who raised a monstrous sea against your nation. Your Ajax, your love on borrowed time.

“A friend, Niko,” you say, tossing a quick glance at the man on the couch. “He’s leaving now.”

Ajax looks stricken, like he doesn’t know how to wrap his mouth around the words he wants to say; like he isn’t even sure there are words. 

He mouths the word ‘Nikolai’ and you turn away.

“Can you stay with us?” your son asks.

“Yeah baby, let’s go back upstairs, okay?”

He nods, and Milena grabs onto your shoulder silently, her blue eyes boring into their mirror across the room. 

You do not look back.

“Do you want children, Ajax?”

The question came out of nowhere in the midst of a sleepless Liyuen twilight, bare skin under a thin blanket in the tranquil comfort of the home he had bought for you.

The Harbinger chuckled lightly, “what’s brought this line of questioning about?”

You had turned to him at that moment, the bed sheets rustling under you, “you speak so fondly of your siblings—almost like a proud doting father. You call yourself the ‘protector’ of their childhood dreams.”

Ajax had smiled cheekily, hand snaking down to rub your lower belly, “are you trying to tell me something?”

You rolled your eyes and he laughed that bright, lovely laugh of his. His soft gaze upon your face and the feeling of his hand inspired at the time a rare, hopeful part of you to blossom and wait on him like a lovesick fool.

“Honestly?”

“Honestly,” you affirmed. 

Ajax had pouted as if he was contemplating it, “I do.”

The easy answer startled you.

“I want an army of my clones that will be able to spar with me forever.”

But what would Ajax be without his defenses?

“Right,” you hummed, “I thought so.”

“Do you?” he asked in return, still rubbing your stomach absentmindedly, “want kids, I mean.”

You pursed your lips, “with the right person and at the right time, perhaps.”

You willed your pounding heart to calm lest the man lying across from you realized that it spelled out his name; only his. His hand climbed up your skin, planting firmly on your hip.

“Right,” he beamed, “I thought so.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” you glanced at him, his lopsided grin and freckled bare shoulders in front of Liyue’s sunrise that peeked through the wooden shutters. 

He hummed noncommittally, “it was a predictable response.”

“Am I predictable to you, then?” 

Mirth danced across his watchful gaze, and Ajax leaned in to close the small gap between you. He kissed you, soft lips filling your limbs with want. 

“In another life perhaps, I’d love nothing more than to be a dad,” he said sincerely, and for a moment hope sparked again, “but I don’t think Celestia grants happiness like that to people like me.”

You furrowed your brows at how easily he had said it, as if this was a fate he’s accepted.

“Would you change that, if you could?” you whispered. 

He chuckled, but there was no joy in it, “don’t you worry your pretty little head about it.”

You grimaced, tucking your chin into his chest. 

“What would that make me, hm? A tragic hero?”

“Well,” you said, tracing the shape of a star into the scattered freckles on his chest. “If we go by your namesake, you’re a fierce warrior of great courage, a pillar of strength.”

He hummed, brushing a strand of your hair behind your ear.

“You fight alongside your brother, Teucer.”

He laughed at that, placing a chaste kiss on your temple.

“You’re described as ‘single-minded and unrelenting’ in battle, but Ajax is doomed by his pride,” you continued, “you are strong and brave, but your pride and honour ends in you driving a blade through your own heart.”

“Ha! That’s stupid,” Ajax laughed again, kissing your nose. 

“Quite,” you affirmed. “His brother Teucer is disowned for not being able to recover his body and effects afterwards.”

Despite it being mythology, you thought you saw the look of something flash across his face. He leaned down, kissed the pulse of your jaw.

“I’m stronger,” he murmured onto your skin, “I’m going to conquer the world.”

You laughed, tugging at his hair so that he would meet your eyes.

“I am content here with you,” you kissed him.

He gave no reply, only kissed you deeper.

Your son looks just like him, Nikolai. Your daughter, too. They’re twins, surely. 

At first he assumes that you have been hiding them because they are someone else’s children, that you did what he dared never to imagine and fell in love with someone else, started a family and no longer thought about him and that was why you wanted him away. But as he kept looking, he knew. 

There is no doubt.

Ajax stands up as you carry them up the stairs, following like a fool in a trance.

You once told him a story, a very long time ago, of the cowherd and the weaver girl, a Liyuen folktale you grew up with. The forbidden lovers were torn apart, banished to opposite ends of the universe to only ever be united once a year on a bridge of magpies.

And now here he stands, watching you put your children—his children, too—to bed with that very story from his place behind the door left slightly ajar. 

His children, he is sure of it. 

He surveys the small room, the fireplace in the corner now burning strong after you tossed in more logs of firewood to warm the kids up. There’s an old rug on the floor but all the toys seem to have been stuffed into a painted wooden chest; you’ve always liked things tidy. He looks at the bedframe, the wood painted also, and he almost laughs because it’s the same paints as the cupboards downstairs. The three chairs, the amount of things you have, your pantry.

He should have seen it. 

He did see it, all of it.

Ajax is waiting to be rudely awakened by Heloir or Foltz any minute now and discover he’d dreamt up some delusion where he gets to be a father. 

A father. And you the other half of it; his other half.

He watches your mouth move, a faint smile in the stretch of your cheeks as you gaze lovingly upon them. You are radiant like this, in the reflection of the flickering firelight dancing across your skin, the modulation of your voice when you reach the parts of the story where a character speaks. 

He would not admit it—cannot admit it—that he wants it. That despite all the odds, despite his horrible hands, despite his blood that sings for battle, he wants to raise children. It disgusts him, this desire and the selfishness of it; its magnitude. 

He thinks for a moment that you are cruel. That he trusted you so much that he couldn’t have even begun to imagine that you could keep something like this from him, that his own children could be sleeping soundly up the very stairs as he sits oblivious to their existence for two weeks. Children , his and yours.

It’s been six years, Ajax, you had said, a lot of things have changed.

He does not presently have the capacity to hurt, he just wants to hold them. That is all, to embrace his twins. 

He knows they are his.

Ajax leaves as quietly as he can, chest heaving with the force of his shock and something else that feels like heartache. You were on the run from him, from the Fatui, the hunters of the House of the Hearth, with twin babies. He bites the inside of his cheek.

He glances back at the cottage one more time, and he thinks of the little boy, Nikolai, and his twin sister. He doesn’t even know her name, his little girl’s name; his and yours.

He needs to go somewhere, do something. 

Milena does not understand why you wouldn’t let her meet her papa. 

He visits almost every night to sit with a steaming mug of tea with you on the porch chair, trading stories and reminiscing about the past, and you even asked them about meeting a papa a few days ago. Now he’s even coming inside the house and she’s sure he’s the one that bought those wonderful macarons a few days ago too. That can only mean one thing!

Oh well, she supposes you don’t actually know that she knows. 

You’re lying in bed after telling them a bedtime story, scrambling for an explanation to give her twin because they both are fighting sleep out of curiosity for the stranger in their home. 

“Mama,” she interrupts, and you look at her with frazzled eyes. “Was that a papa?”

“W-well, baby—I—um,” you swallow. 

“S’okay mama,” Nikolai says, reaching up to cup your face, “don’t cry.”

“I’m not crying, my lovelies,” you soothe, brushing your hand through his hair. 

“That man just now…”

Milena rarely sees her mama that deep in thought, your furrowed brows and cautious words inspires her to wonder how hard adult life must be. What a wonderful thing to be a child; now all she needs is her papa.

“How about this,” you sigh, “let me ask you a question, and you can think about it, okay?”

They nod.

“If I told you that you can meet someone—meet him , and that you can choose after whether you want him to be your papa or not, would you want to do that?” you say.

“So if I say he’s not my papa, then he’ll go away?” Nikolai replies. 

“Yeah,” you smile.

“But he loves you,” Milena says matter-of-factly.

“You—what?” you chuckle awkwardly, shaking your head, “that’s not what matters baby.”

“Yeah it does,” Milena replies, “he comes here all the time!”

You furrow your brows and Milena braces for a scolding. 

“Milly, you can’t stay up past bedtime,” you start, “and you shouldn’t spy on adults.”

“But if you love that papa, he’s our papa,” she admonishes. 

It makes perfectly sound sense to her, why don’t you get it?

“Well,” you sigh once again, “I love you two, and that’s what matters to me.”

Milena doesn’t see what that has to do with anything, but she’s starting to feel really sleepy. 

You reach over to place a kiss on her forehead and she yawns, tucking her chin into the blanket as she snuggles closer to Nikolai.

“I wanna meet papa,” she says sleepily. “Can I?”

“We’ll see, okay?” you reply. 

Milena is too tired to keep her eyes open, but as she drifts off to sleep, she wonders what kind of person her new papa is. The last thing she hears is her twin’s reply.

“I want mama to be happy.”

You find Ajax on the porch in the morning. 

You felt him as soon as the wards came up at dawn, and here you are now, steeling yourself before you open the door and have the dreaded conversation. Before everything changes.

The calls of cuckoos and warblers in the trees are starting to rise with the dawning sun, heralding the rest of the forest away from slumber. You inhale, hand on the doorknob.

He jolts as soon as the door creaks open, wide-eyed and clothes soiled by dirt and tar. The cusp of the morning makes you feel as if the world is not yet real, the lightening of the forest without the touch of sunlight quite yet. 

“Where did you go?” you ask, perhaps trying to delay the inevitable. You’re guessing he went to fight the clockwork mekka across the mountain. 

“They’re ours.”

His and yours. It’s not a question, but you nod anyway.

“You didn’t…” Ajax starts, and you almost think he will cry, “why?”

You purse your lips; in guilt or hesitance you do not know.

“What are their names?”

You glance at him, “Nikolai… Nikolai and Milena.”

He lets out a disbelieving laugh, as if he thinks he is dreaming.

“Don’t do this right now, Ajax—”

“Don’t do what?” he says, voice rising with anger.

“I don’t—I don’t want to hear it from you,” you say, turning away.

The twins are curious, you can see it. They’ve never seen a single soul come near the house, let alone sit on their couch sharing a blanket with you. The extent of their interactions in public were immunity days, and the closest person to them is Olga whom they see once in a blue moon—but that’s over within the few hours you spent in the city.

And then there is the plain and simple fact that Ajax would be a wonderful father. That, despite his reputation and despite his penchant for trouble—his twins will adore him, worship him as if he were a god. They will love him as you loved him, and he will love them as you love them.

You just don’t know if it can work like this.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” he says, breathless and pained.

“You tried to drown my city.”

“I—you know I loved you—you know I still—”

“Stop, Ajax,” you reply, “I don’t owe you anything.”

“Do you even hear yourself?” he retorts, “what the hell do you—”

“Stop. You have no right—”

“I’m their father.” 

At that, you whip your head towards him.

“That means nothing ,” you spit through the surge of sudden red-hot fury. “ I nursed and changed and bathed and clothed them. I was there for their first steps, their first words, I read them their bedtime stories, I was there when Milena had colic for two weeks, and because they’re twins, when Nikolai had it for another three after that—do you know that when Milena cries, Nikolai cries too? And when Nikolai cries, of course Milena cries—so it was like both kids were colicky for five damned weeks. You were not there.”

When he says nothing, you continue, “I know what they like, what they hate, I know what they need. They are perfect right here— we are perfect. I have carved out a life for us here, one that I will do anything to protect.”

The implication of what you are protecting them from is unspoken, but it hangs in the air nonetheless.

“That’s not fair,” he says quietly, “I didn’t know that you were—that they existed.” 

“And that changes nothing,” you say, cold, “we have been fine without you, and will continue to be so.”

“What the hell are you saying?” his voice is tinged with a sadness that you have never heard from him.

You look away.

He grabs your wrists, pleading with his eyes, “why?”

You furrow your brows.

“They’re ours,” he lets out a pained breath, “ours, our babies, do you know how much—”

“Ajax,” you can’t face him like this, honest hurt eyes that fill you with regret. 

“How do I make you forgive me? I will bring the entire world down to—”

“Stop, Ajax.”

You don’t know. The truth is that you don’t know why you have kept this from him, whether it was bitterness, shame, fear; you are still unsure. The way you felt about him was in constant oscillation between those twisted emotions, and sometimes, you just missed him. In a simple, desperate, human way, you missed him despite what he did.

“Tell me,” he begs, “please.” 

“They will know you just to lose you.”

“Please,” he says, but you are unsure what he is begging for. “I’ll do anything—please.”

You bite your cheek hard enough to taste copper. You know he cannot keep that promise, that duty will call, that his hunger will always be a warsong.

“I just… give me some time with them—please,” he looks stricken.

Perhaps Nikolai and Milena want to know him because they could sense, somehow, a shift. Like the smell of the air before a storm. Olga once told you that children are more observant than you might think.

“Don’t underestimate your babies,” the old woman said the very day they were born, “they can feel what you feel as if they were your own heart, even if they can’t put words to it quite yet.”

You had looked down at them then, nursing soundly in your arms, that first sore suckle that drew forth what had been collecting even before their parturition, like pale golden nectar made of your very own blood. The substance believed in ancient mythology to have been the bearer of the very stars in the sky, the act of feeding that medieval Fontainians believed temporarily effaced the corporeal barrier between mother and child.

Olga had told you that you were their nourishment; both in flesh and spirit. You wondered then if you were enough, and the treacherous part of your heart dared to miss their father.

You look at him now, his freckled nose and fiery wind-swept hair, glassy azure-blue eyes the same deep colour as your twins’. He’s here. 

“I’ll keep coming back—for you, for them,” he says desperately, “I’ll do anything.”

The Tsaritsa’s weapon, the Harbingers’ Vanguard. 

“Please.”

You had loved a sword, perhaps it was wrong to be surprised when you woke up to find it poised at the column of your own throat. 

If you let him into their lives, will your twins be meeting their father, or that same blade? 

Is there a difference?

“On my terms,” you say quietly, and Ajax’s eyes melt into what you think is relief. 

“Anything,” he whispers.

Chapter Text

Ajax leaves for Snezhnaya that same evening with the knowledge that the next time he returns to you, he will meet his twins. And he will return, it is so natural to him that it is almost as if the thought is second-nature, as if he has always been returning to the two parts of his soul that he did not know he was missing. He doesn’t even know them yet, but all he can do is think of them.

Heloir tells him, conveniently, that no one deigned to mention to him that ‘the witch’ had children because ‘Father’ made it clear that the twins had nothing to do with the deal, and therefore would be exempt from any discussion of the hunt. He could barely bring himself to respond when she mutters about how it’s a bummer that the hunt is mysteriously off.

He is almost inspired to raise his sword against Arlecchino for it; he knows she knew. It would be an exhilarating battle if anything. 

He arrives at the frigid grounds of the Fatui headquarters, takes his orders from his Archon, carries them out with practiced precision, and tends to his duties at Zapolyarny Palace diligently. It all passes by unnoticed by the Eleventh because all he can do is try to recall every detail about the two children he saw the night before he left Fontaine. 

His children, your children. He scarcely allowed himself to dream of it. Freckles, cornflower blue eyes, hair a mix of yours and his. He wonders what they’d look like lisping on the grass in their infancy, what manner of trouble they get up to, how you’ve raised them these years.

That is why you were sleeping constantly in the few months leading up to the fateful day he left for the Golden House, why you were dazed and tired all the time. He couldn’t have even begun to imagine that this was the reason, that you were nurturing two lives. His and yours.

Before long, he is back at the little cottage in the Marcotte mountains after sunset, knocking that habitual pattern into your front door. Ajax holds his breath as it swings open after a few seconds to reveal a waiting Hugo at your feet.

“Hey buddy,” he greets the canine creature before he looks back up to you.

“So,” you start as he enters, “you still want to meet them.”

Ajax shoots you an incredulous look—as if he could ever want anything but .

“Right,” you say.

He sets his things down, watching from the corner of his eye as you stand there awkwardly, fiddling with your hands.

“They’re asleep,” you tell him, “you can meet them tomorrow.”

“Oh,” he says, slightly dumbstruck.

“You can stay here—I have more blankets for the couch.”

“Oh,” he says again, even more dumbstruck. 

You bring him the promised blankets, showing him to where the bathroom is upstairs and bidding him goodnight with a warning not to wake them. He stands there awkwardly as you disappear into your bedroom, and a foreign feeling settles into him. 

He looks around at the small space of the upstairs corridor, shelving filled to the brim with books and toys. He ought to ask you how you’ve accumulated so many miscellaneous items if you’ve been on the run for so long. After he cleans up, he opens the door to the twins’ room ever-so-slightly, sneaking a glance at their slumbering forms alight with moonlight. 

His chest squeezes.

Ajax goes to bed (or the couch) with the knowledge that when he wakes, he will be changed. He listens to the crackling of the dying fire, Hugo’s snores, and he drifts off to sleep.

Ajax is a light sleeper in that he has been trained to sleep in such a way that he’d be able to detect danger even in a state of rest. He recalls the occasional feeling of panic when your presence used to lull him to sleep so soundly that he would actually dream. He’d wake up content next to you the next morning, but still with the fleeting thought that had he been in the Abyss then, he would have been dead because of how well he slept. 

Whether it is his anticipation or habit, he already hears their tiny footsteps as they reach the landing of the cottage stairs.

The next thing he hears is whispering.

“But we saw him before!”

“He’s the papa mama said we can meet?”

“Shh, he’s gonna wake up!”

“Mama is sleeping too.”

“It’s okay, Niko.”

“What if he’s dangerous?”

He slowly opens his eyes to the sight of two pairs of stark blue ones staring at him from the foot of the couch. He can’t help but grin, the hammering of his heart inspiring him to speak, albeit softly.

“Hey,” he says, “my name is Ajax.”

The twins stare at him, the picture of themselves lying on their couch. He chances that it’s still early in the morning, the sun barely making its climb into the sky yet.

“What are your names?”

Nikolai’s hair is longer than Teucer’s when he was five, it goes down to the middle of his neck. Milena’s hair is the slightest bit longer, almost touching her shoulder. He wonders if you’re the one who trims their hair, whether they ask for braids or ponytails or anything of the sort.

Ajax watches them exchange a look.

“My name is Milly,” his daughter says.

Milena, for love.

“I’m Niko,” his son adds.

Nikolai, for victory.

“Where’s your matusya?” Ajax inquires, stretching his limbs lazily.

“What’s a maytoosha?” Nikolai asks, testing out the word on his tongue.

“ Ma-tus-ya , that’s what we call our mama where I’m from sometimes,” he says.

“Are you a papa?” Milena says suddenly and his heart almost stops.

Children and their voracious thirst for knowledge. 

“Is your mama asleep?” he pointedly ignores her question because he isn’t sure how you want him to approach this quite yet.

“Where are you from?” another question from the little girl. 

“I’m from Snezhnaya—”

“Wow!” Nikolai bellows, “do you have domovyk at your house?”

Ajax almost laughs. Domovyk, you mentioned them that first night when he asked why you kept looking up to the cottage. He is then confronted by the fact that you taught them that, not brownies or domovoy, but domovyk. 

What’s in a name?

“Of course I do,” he answers readily. “Once, when I was little, I snuck into the kitchen when everyone else was asleep so I could eat some bread secretly, but I saw the domovyk cleaning our table—we call him dido at home, it means grandpa—so I went straight back to bed.”

The twins both giggle at this and something in him stirs, a paralysing adoration he feels down to his bones. He hears your footsteps then, rapid shuffling upstairs.

“Milly? Niko?” your voice sounds frantic.

Ajax watches you fly down the steps and freeze when you lock eyes with your twins.

This is not how you wanted it to go, though you are not quite sure how exactly you wanted it to go either. Your heart is hammering in the confines of your chest.

“Milly, Niko,” you say sternly, and the twins walk guiltily away from the couch.

At least they have a routine you can use to scaffold the day. 

“Yes, mama?” they say in a chorus.

“Did you brush your teeth?”

Your twins shake their heads in unison.

“Do you want to go do that now?”

They nod, both looking back at the man on the couch before they trod upstairs with Hugo. A beat of silence passes as you and Ajax watch them, their little voices chatting about what they want to do during playtime today.

You sigh, running a hand through your hair. Ajax gets up, folding the blankets and leaving them in a neat pile at one end of the couch before he walks across the room to you.

“How do I…” he hesitates, “how do you want to do this?”

You blink up at him. 

“I’ve already told them,” you say before you turn away, making for the kitchen to prepare breakfast for yourselves and Hugo.

“What?” he stumbles after you.

“Not like that,” you say, “I told them that they could meet you, and then they can decide whether they want you to be their papa or not.”

“Oh.”

You purse your lips, but you do not face him, opting instead to grab some leftover rice, cooked fowl, and vegetables from the old cryo-powered fridge for a quick congee. 

“They don’t usually get up this early,” you tell him as you set the rice up to boil in stock, “I wake up before them and prepare breakfast.”

You suppose you’re telling him this because a guilty part of you wants to help him make up for lost time. You are unsure how things are going to go, but if by the end of it he decides having two young kids is too much for the life of a Harbinger, you will make sure the pieces are picked up and put back together spotlessly if it’s the last thing you do. 

Though, you know him, and you know that it would not come to it—yet you will be prepared for the worst nonetheless; it’s for your twins.

“Then we go for bathtime and then Hugo gets his walk,” you add.

Ajax watches you chop ginger from where he leans against the threshold between the kitchen and the living room, silent save for the way he drums his finger against the arm he has crossed against his chest. You look at him then, taking a deep breath.

“You’re not going to lie to them,” you state, setting your knife down, and he furrows his brows.

You used to sense his siblings’ longing through their letters. That bittersweet silent asking for him to come home, but a simultaneous knowing that he is a wild-child, a bird whose wings have room for more adventures yet; they could not possibly cage him. You refuse to let that be the life your twins will live. 

“They will know that you are a soldier and that you are not a constant,” you say. “They have been living the same way since they can remember, and you’ll have to fit into that—not the other way around. Once they start going to school, there will be a different routine, and you’ll have to fit into that as well. We can exchange letters, but you will ensure discretion, and do not make promises you cannot keep. And do not tell them about your vision or how you got it, is that clear?”

You turn to him when he lets the silence stick to the air between you, frustration tugging your lips into a frown. You blink in surprise when you find that he’s already crossed the small distance of the kitchen, he takes your hand in his and you survey him with calculating eyes.

“Hey,” he says, smiling, “we’ll figure it out.”

We. You have not been a ‘we’ in six years and you have fared well regardless. You do not need to be a ‘we’ again, as long as your twins are safe and as long as they are happy. 

“Be gentle with them.”

His brow scrunches, “of course.”

“Mama, mama!” Milena’s voice startles you away from Ajax, your finger suddenly burning from the sensation of his touch. 

“H-hey Milly, why are you shouting?” you say, clearing your throat.

You watch her run to you, Nikolai hot on her heels. She jumps into your arms and a smile easily makes its way onto your face as you pick your daughter up. Nikolai throws his arms around your legs and perches his chin on your thigh as he looks up at where his sister rests on your arm. Ajax only watches.

“My tooth is wobbly!” the girl says enthusiastically, smiling to show you how her bottom left canine is moving with a gentle nudge of her finger. 

You gasp with delight, “do you know what that means?”

Nikolai lets go of you, arms in the air, “tooth fairy!”

“Not yet,” you smile, ruffling his hair and then kissing Milena’s cheek, “but soon.”

Ajax finally makes a sound, a chuckle from his place not far from where you stand with your twins; his twins. The gentleness in his gaze makes you look away.

“How much did the tooth fairy give you, mister?” Milena asks. 

You’ve always wondered why your twins have never been the shy type despite not having ventured far from home that often. 

“It depends,” he answers readily, “my molars got me two-hundred mora each, and my front teeth got me a whopping five-hundred each.”

You are unsure whether the little things can entirely grasp the concept of money, but those big numbers inspire a spark in their eyes. You let Milena down and tell them both to get set up for breakfast, asking for an extra place for Ajax, and they each run dutifully to do their assigned tasks.

Ajax watches as they do so, Milena grabbing bunches of forks and spoons and Nikolai bringing out mismatching placemats; you had knitted them with leftover yarn. You add the leftover fowl and vegetables and stir the steaming pot slowly, sprinkling in salt and some soy sauce. You give Hugo his food and he chows down as if you hadn’t fed him in five years and you roll your eyes at the greedy thing.

In all honesty, you expected things to be awkward, but he seems to fit naturally into their morning chatter; you forgot he’s always been good with children. They continue to discuss the tooth fairy as you spoon the thickened congee into four bowls, and Ajax helps you bring them to the table where he occupies the once-cluttered chair next to you.

Milena regards him with a degree of caution (which is interesting considering her usual affinity for fathers), Nikolai stays his easy-going self, Hugo comes to sit beside him at the dining table like a loyal guard dog, and you only observe carefully. 

Ajax sees you in them. 

Despite the copper tinge, he sees how their hair resembles yours. The finer details of their features, too, like the shape of their eyes and the slope of their chin. He is enchanted by the thought that these very two children walking hand in hand in front of him up a dirt path in the Fontainian countryside are a product of the way he loved you and the way you loved him back; a reciprocity that brought life even if it was unintended.

They are so small, he thinks. Their hands barely cover his palm and he only knows that because he helped Milena up from a fall. He commits the sound of her ‘thank you Ajax’ to memory. 

He feels the weight of the past five years more intensely than he ever has, like a blind cavern under the awning of his rib-bones that does not know what his children looked like the day they were born. 

What you looked like.

He does not know the smell of their infant hair or the sound of their crying, he does not know each of their first words nor does he know when they started to walk. He doesn’t know when their first teeth came in, doesn’t know when they started on solids, doesn’t even know who the older twin is. When were they able to flip onto their bellies on their own? Did they like tummy time? Did they crawl before they stood?

It is surreal, he supposes, watching you with them. Your smile that the twins elicit by nature of being yours. He imagines how you could have done it all on your own, providing them with an enriching life despite the hunt. You had asked him to be gentle with them, and part of him curses himself for ever leading you to believe he could be anything but that to his own.

He remembers his mother’s back pain when she had Teucer, and he wonders if you suffered from the same sore feet and sleepless nights. He wonders what you did to handle their teething, how you soothed their fevers. He wonders whether you slept well when they were infants, whether you ate well, whether you were terrified, whether he could ever make up for it.

“Mister Ajax,” Nikolai’s voice reels him back to the present. “Blackberries!”

The little boy holds out his fist expectantly, cornflower-blue eyes twinkling up at him. Ajax unfurls his hand and watches a jumble of black and purple berries fall into his palm, letting the feeling of his son’s fingers brushing against his scarred skin carve itself into his memories.

You sit on a rock, rubbing Hugo’s pale white fur as Milena feeds you berries from her own little hands. She reaches up to play with the golden locket around your neck as you chew, and he is struck by how small her fingers are, wrapped around his gift to you.

They are so little, his twins. 

You chat with your daughter about bramble and elderflower lemonade and how long it’ll take until the flowers start to bloom, and whether the domovyk would like a share of the drink once she makes it.

Your gaze catches on him, and his eyes follow the small curve of your lips upward when you give him the ghost of a smile, the dark purple stain of the berries on your mouth. His lips tingle with the desire to kiss you.

Chapter Text

Milena isn’t sure about this papa business anymore.

He looks at you a certain way, Milena is not sure what it means, but she doesn’t like it. You throw glances at him a certain way, too. It’s like those looks you exchange with adults in the Court of Fontaine when you talk to them about something she doesn’t understand, but even worse because it feels like there is something more .

She sits at breakfast the day he is set to leave, watching the man who now occupies the seat that was once piled high with books and sewing equipment. He is very handsome, like the way princes are described in all your stories—but that doesn’t mean that she has to like him!

When Milena had heard your voice searching for them that morning the twins found him on the couch, she was reminded once again of the day of your birthday. She doesn’t like that feeling, and if this papa guy has something to do with making you feel uneasy, then Milena doesn’t want him around. 

She doesn’t think she wants things to change.

You introduced him as ‘Ajax’ and said that he’d be staying for a few days because he is an old friend. 

She knows that he is her papa, and she knows Nikolai knows, too. 

You said they can choose, so Milena only needs to have a feel for it until she ultimately tells him very politely that she is perfectly fine the way she is, without a papa, thank you very much.

There is just something there, unspoken between you and the tall man that tells Milena that she needs to keep watch. That’s not for you to worry about , you would tell her, but it’s about time she gets to be an adult too!

Ugh! Milena can’t explain it, but suddenly she no longer feels like a papa is a necessity. 

Perhaps Nikolai was right, he could find a magical sword and protect the family just fine without some papa coming in. She swore to find her papa to make you happy, but now she is not so sure the vow she sleepily made with her twin should come to fruition.

Admittedly, Milena has many more sophisticated thoughts that she cannot yet put into words. It annoys her greatly that her brilliance is restricted by something as absurd as spoken language. 

Where has this papa guy been, anyways? All the papas in the stories you tell them seem to be there for the mamas, in fact there are so many more stories where the papas are there and the mamas are not. What is up with that?

Anyways, he stays for an awfully long time. Four days? That’s enough for her to learn a new song on the èrhú! No one has ever ever been in the house except for you, Milena, her twin, and Hugo. Maybe she had taken it for granted. 

He does tell fun stories, though (but that doesn’t mean she likes him!). It feels like she is getting to know you like she never was able to before. It makes Milena feel a certain way (that she does not have the words for yet) knowing that Ajax knows you in a way she never could, only by virtue of being someone who was a part of your life when she wasn’t. Those unspoken moments, the things he says about you that she never even thought to imagine before—it makes her feel something she doesn’t like.

She doesn’t like it one bit.

Ajax slips naturally into the twins’ lives. 

He helps with breakfast, takes Hugo for walks, fixes up rickety appliances and accompanies you in the garden—Nikolai even asks him for stories of his adventures and Milena pretends that she isn’t listening in but you see her perking up when he gets to the exciting bits. They are especially intrigued by real stories, stories Ajax tells them about his life when you were part of it for two odd years. 

Stories about meeting you in the Liyue wilderness, about his performances in plays, about your band and your friends who played all sorts of instruments. They adore his mentions of the èrhú and Nikolai practically falls over when he is told that the one he plays now was a gift from the man.

You watch warily each time he leaves for sadness in your twins, but you do not find any. Amidst the whirlwind of emotions you have been tamping down in favour of mediating, you feel relief. You’ve barely gotten to talk to him about anything, only moving on autopilot and supervising. The twins seem perfectly fine, and you wonder if it is your doing that they find it so easy to say goodbye.

A month passes by between his coming and going, and he slowly fits into their routine. He stays for two or three days, leaves for however long and comes back with trinkets in his rucksack from whichever place he has traveled to and gifts them to his twins. 

A part of you feels guilty, because it all looks so right, because Ajax was made to come home smiling, he was made to sit beside them and tell them stories about ice-fishing and kazky from Morepesok, to poke random mushrooms in the forest with them, to put mora under Milena’s pillow after she loses her first tooth, to teach Nikolai lines from poetry and plays.

For a moment you are able to forget the epithets of your ex-lover, to see him as just Ajax, not the Eleventh, not the Vanguard, just the father of your wonderful children. They will love him, adore him; you think a part of them already does. 

Your stomach churns with anxiety.

It’s strange. 

There was no explosion, no other tangible evidence of anything changing in his life save for the fact that Ajax now returns to Fontaine to visit his loves. There was no dramatic moment, no grand revelation, nothing like the storylines Ajax would portray in the theatres and nothing like the mythical folklore you would tell. It just feels right, as if this is what he was made for.

He has twin children, five years old. They were born on a late-summer Sunday, at the cusp of autumn’s dawning. His son, the older of the two, loves stories about heroes, he loves theatre and music and he loves water; it is almost ironic. His daughter is an incredibly voracious reader, and she loves the creatures of the earth, and though he is told that she is a romantic (both in the sense of the era of Mondstadt bards and literally), he has yet to see that side of her. They both rarely cry for children so young, and their discipline when it comes to their daily routine is immeasurable—though he sees the occasional spark of mischief in both of them.

The spring days are warming up, and each time he returns to the cottage nestled in the Marcotte woods, he is overcome with joy. Ajax knows thrill, but this inexplicable love for life that he sees reflected back to him in the cornflower blue pearls of his twins’ eyes, that is something new. It feels the same way he does when he is honing his skills for battle, but perhaps gentler, a tug at his heart that sings of home.

He awakens on the couch his fourth time back, a stream of sunlight warming his face through the curtains drawn over the windows overlooking the forest beyond. He first thinks of you, whether you’re awake, whether the bathroom smells like you now after your morning shower. The magnetic pull of your presence has always been hard for him to resist, like bees to pollen and bears to dripping honey.

Oftentimes he finds himself reaching for you as if you were simply a piece of him. He sees Milena on your lap as you go through phonics and he wants to pull you both into a crushing embrace and confess litanies of adoration into your hair and hers. When he watches you put them to bed with a story, a poem, sometimes a song—he wants to lean in and kiss your cheek. When he sits and braids their hair, and he watches your warm gaze cast upon them, he often wonders what he would have to do in order for you to look at him with such saccharine eyes. Then, he has to remind himself that you are not his, not to have nor to hold, and yet he is still content to just watch you with the twins; his and yours.

Ajax groans, stretching his limbs on the almost too-small couch as he listens to the wood flooring upstairs creak with your footsteps. He cranes his head to watch as you descend the steps, as quietly as you can with the rickety old things, and he can’t help the smile when he sees that familiar noctilucous jade necklace that rests on your sternum, vibrant blue contrasting the equally striking green of your dendro pearls. 

He gets up to greet you, running a hand through his messy hair.

“Ajax,” you turn away abruptly when your eyes land on the bare plain of his torso. “Why are you naked?”

“I’m not naked,” he says it like it’s a question. 

With your palm across your eyes you reply, “put on some clothes.”

“It’s getting warmer,” he explains.

“I don’t care!”

“Nothing you’ve never seen before,” he shrugs, but he senses you might shove him in the fireplace if he continues any longer. 

He goes to the rucksack in the corner of the room and fishes out a worn t-shirt for your sake. 

“Did you need something?” he asks.

You finally look at him, but your gaze wanders from his hair down his face and all across his scarred shoulders and he opens his mouth to tease you again as he pulls the t-shirt over his head.

“Do not,” you admonish, “say a word.”

He pouts but that doesn’t keep the budding smile at bay. 

“It’s a nice day,” you say, “the twins want to go into the city.”

“Perfect,” he says.

You almost turn away, but something in your expression tells him that you are deliberating.

“I need a favour,” you say hesitantly.

“Anything,” he smiles, scratching the back of his neck with a yawn.

“I will be…” you seem to ponder your words, “unavailable for a few days—sometime in the future, that is. Will you look after them for me then?”

“Yes,” there is not a single situation in which he would ever say otherwise. “Of course, yes.”

His heart is giddy.

You sigh, “thank you.”

He stands there, staring back at you and the tension that builds over the silent minute snaps when you whirl around. He almost reaches out as an instinctual reaction; as if you were his magnet.

“I’m going to get them ready,” you clear your throat, “can you take care of breakfast?”

“Consider it done.”

Something blooms in his chest as you make your way back upstairs, like a soft creature settling into the cavern of his ribs and making a home curled around his heart.

Oh gods, oh gods, oh gods. You’ve forgotten the way Ajax looks when he first wakes up. 

You don’t think you’ll forget ever again. Tired eyes and glowing skin, hair tousled from sleep. The lean muscle of his torso, scars across the expanse of it and the scattering of freckles and beauty marks. 

You are reminded of Diarmuid of the Love Spot. The warrior who slayed three-thousand enemies in one swift battle, marked by the ball seirce that made any woman who laid eyes on him keel over with infatuation. There are more scars than you remember on his skin, and for a moment you had the faint thought of running your fingers over them, to know that he is real, that he is different now. Something in you stirs bitterly when you suddenly wonder if anyone else has gotten to know him the way you have in the six years you’ve been apart. And then you remind yourself that the bitterness should be only for him, for how he betrayed you and tried to drown your beloved nation and drove you from your home (you ignore the realization that you no longer feel contempt towards him at that thought).

Nikolai grows somehow more enamoured by Ajax every single moment they spend together. Even though Milena is tentative when it comes to the new addition in her life, she still regards him with a degree of curiosity that tells you it is only a matter of time until she follows suit.

You watch him, your past lover, watching his own daughter and son share a plate of Crepes Suzette at Café Lutece and telling them that they need to try his matusya ’s mlyntsi (‘your babusya’, he says unabashedly), to which they inquire as to who she may be and what those treats are, and thus the afternoon is spent unraveling Ajax’s (admittedly expansive) family tree and how each person contributed to each recipe that he knows. Their excitement is unrivalled when he tells them about Masnytsya, a festival where the pancakes are celebrated and eaten for an entire week, their blue eyes widening in wonder. 

The twins are bouncing off the walls on their sugar high as you walk the busy cobbled streets back to the station, but you don’t have the heart to tell them off because they’ve been especially happy today. Ajax inches closer to you absentmindedly as you walk, his hands on the handle of the twin pushchair that he insisted on buying.

And you can’t help it, either. You allow yourself to forget the burdens of the past and you smile, and you smile and you smile because It’s him, here, that penchant for life and everything that belongs to it and it is your twins who mirror that very joy. 

They are like the sun.

This papa guy is really cool. His name is Ajax, just like that hero you once told him about.

He’s told Nikolai a bajillion stories since he got here and he even tells him stories about you! Nikolai hasn’t learned this much about Liyue in all the years he can remember, stories about big ships that fight monsters and a floating rock where the queen of the nation lives.

Nikolai senses that there is something going on between you and Ajax, and something else in the boy also tells him to trust the tall ginger man. He feels familiar in a way that he is unable to explain and maybe that is what a papa is supposed to be, just like Milena used to tell him about. 

She’s not that inclined towards a papa anymore, Nikolai notes. But his sister is incapable of hiding her affections, he feels exactly how much she wants to know more about you through the man’s stories. He also sees how she gets all shy when he calls her a nickname.

“That’s a tricky one, snowflake,” Ajax says, noting the character on her paper.

Milena’s eyes widen, then she furrows her brows, “I’m not a snowflake.”

He laughs, “you’re very little, and cold, and so cute. Just like a snowflake.”

Nikolai’s twin huffs, turning away from the man and resuming her shūfǎ next to where you sit at the dining table, but he wants a nickname too! 

“Um… Ajax?” he says unsurely.

“What is it, little prince?” 

Nikolai’s heart beams when he hears the nickname, slipping so easily out of Ajax’s mouth.

“Is that my nickname?” Nikolai asks.

The man looks surprised, and as Nikolai inches closer to him, he picks him up off his chair and places him on his lap naturally. 

“Do you not like it?” says Ajax.

“I like it!” Nikolai replies, and he says nothing as he nuzzles into the warmth of the man whose eyes look exactly like his.

Ajax is very warm, Nikolai likes that. Come winter, you are always fretting about whether the twins are warm enough, and Nikolai hates seeing you worry about the draft from the old windows and whether you’d be able to gather enough wood to dry in time to use as kindling. The twins are supposed to sleep with you in the colder months because you are worried about keeping them warm and though Nikolai loves being with his mama, he can occasionally feel the anxiety from you and he is unsettled by it. He’d sometimes wake in the middle of the night to see you just lying there, watching them sleep with an unconsciously furrowed brow.

The thought of you not having to worry about anything brings Nikolai great joy, and so if Ajax stays for the winter, you’ll surely worry less with an extra source of heat around. He examines Ajax then, the way his arms wrap around him comfortably, naturally.

Nikolai likes this a lot. 

“You’re Kolya, my little prince, and your sister’s a little princess—and a snowflake, too.”

“Kolya?”

“That’s a nickname for ‘Nikolai’ in Snezhnaya,” he says.

That is the coolest thing ever, he has his own Snezhnayan nickname!

“Is mama a queen?” he inquires further.

Ajax smiles, “of course she is.”

He could practically see Milena’s ears perk up at the mention of princes and princesses—and she is definitely feeling all excited about being called a princess. Nikolai watches you exchange a look with the man whose lap he sits on from across the table, and he gets giddy when he sees the way Ajax looks at you.

This man who looks at you like you are the person who planted the very blades of grass onto the earth, who sowed the very first seeds of wildflowers, who put fish in the sea and stars in the sky. He thinks you ought to know, but you are always so busy. You pen characters expertly onto delicate paper, each graceful movement of your wrist reminding Nikolai of the flow of water. Ajax’s eyes are trained on you, easily, as if that is where he would find himself naturally had all else in the world disappeared.

Nikolai doesn’t think you even notice it.

Chapter Text

Folklorists trace Oceanids back hundreds of years to the Cataclysm, the stewards to the Hydro Archon Egeria. Seafarers often make offerings before their journeys in what they believe would be a form of appeasement, rituals and sacrifices in the old days and prayers and bits of grain nowadays as a formality. 

“Mama, can we go to the beach tomorrow?” Nikolai wonders, abandoning his toy lumitoile on the grass in favour of padding up to you.

Your son loves the beach. He loves it in the sun and he loves it under the light of the moon—though the latter rarely ever happens because you do not want them out late at night. 

“Have you and Milly finished the new problems I gave you for maths?” you ask him.

He pouts, looking down at the ground unsurely.

Bioluminescence, that is one of his favourite words. He is also taken by ships and voyages, his affinity for water being yet another point of concern for you as his mother.

What may be learned from the Oceanids is that water takes any shape. 

You just wish it wouldn’t take the shape of your old flame and the father of your two children, standing soaked in the clearing of the forest you call home; perhaps he would go away if you made a ritual offering. But here he is with blazing eyes and wild hair, maroon dress-shirt undone and damp with the spray of his hydro-teleportation. 

And the twins saw everything. 

“Ajax,” you say, and you don’t need to add anything else for him to know that it is a scolding.

“I didn’t want to be late,” he explains, winded. 

He was due to visit today, and to his credit, he has made it in time before you herded the twins away from the garden for their bathtime.

Nikolai squeals, “you have magic!”

The boy runs to his father, and Ajax sweeps him up easily, spins him around and delighting in his son’s squeals as you watch. 

You slap a hand over your face.

Okay, well, you technically didn’t tell him that he couldn’t use the vision, you only said to make no mention of it or how it came to be in his possession.

“I’ve missed you, buddy,” Ajax says, “what are you guys up to, hm?”

“The beach mama!” Nikolai says.

“Hey Milly,” Ajax greets his daughter walking with Hugo from where she was crouched in the garden searching for earthworms.

“Are we going to the beach?” she says excitedly.

“I love the beach!” their father says.

You give Ajax a withering glare, but he does not balk, only returns your look with a devious smile. 

“Me too!” your boy adds. 

Milena giggles as Ajax picks her up too, resting her hands on his shoulder. You ignore the ease in which he does it, the way they both look so comfortable in his hold.

“What did I say about maths, Niko?” you say.

Ajax smirks knowingly, bouncing his twins in his arms, “c’mon, it’s just one day.”

And before you know it, you are on the coastline the following day, sun in the sky as Ajax unpacks the basket of blankets and snacks to lay out on the fine Fontainian sand. You do not allow yourself to be disarmed by his beaming smile as he looks up at you where he kneels on the sand, showing Milena how to weigh down each corner of the blanket with miscellaneous items he picks out from the basket in case the wind blows too strongly.

Nikolai has not stopped asking about Ajax’s vision, how it works, how he got it, but to your utter relief, Ajax has made good on escaping the details. 

“Why don’t we go in the water, Niko?” you prod, “visions are for grown-ups like mama’s one, ‘kay?” 

“Let’s go! I wanna see eels!” Milena shouts.

“Don’t shout baby,” you chide.

“Sorry mama,” she replies.

The older of the twins pouts, but the temptation of mid-spring swimming is too difficult for him to resist and so he follows his sister as she runs—and trips—across the sand. He offers her a hand up and they giggle as they make their way, you and Hugo following suit to keep watch.

Nikolai and Hugo curl up beside Ajax after their swim for snacks and you take Milena into the forest as per her request (to search for creepy crawlies, of course). 

“Mama,” your daughter says after five minutes of tranquil silence, picking up a snail from a fallen branch.

“What’s up Milly?” 

“Do you love Ajax?” she turns the snail around to examine its shell.

Yes. He is very easy to love. 

“Why’d you ask, baby?”

She pouts as if deep in thought, setting the small snail back down. You adjust the towel that falls from her shoulder as she straightens back up and fixes you with furrowed brows. 

“He’s gonna stay forever?”

And that is it. What if they want him to stay forever? How do you tell them that he can’t?

“Do you want him to stay forever?”

Your daughter quickly shakes her head, “I like now.”

“You mean you like the way things are right now?”

She nods.

You smile, “that’s okay Milly, everything will stay just like this.”

“Promise?”

“Pinky promise.”

She trods up to you, throwing her arms around your legs and you pick her up by her armpits, letting her sit in the crook of your arm as you look at your precious little girl.

“As long as I’m here, everything will be okay,” you say.

“Love you mama,” she smiles, and you smile too because seeing the stretch of her cheeks and her missing canine is perhaps the only thing you need to make your heart unfurl like the petals of a delicate flower.

After she decides she’s looked for enough bugs and slugs (she couldn’t find the beetle she wanted), you take her back to the beach because the sun is starting to make its climb back down to slumber in the bed of the horizon. The golden light kisses the quaint Fontainian country and your daughter’s hand in yours as you walk the sandy path back down to the shore inspires a simple joy, and you have the faint thought that you wish they wouldn’t grow up so quickly, your twins. 

When you come upon the beach, sunlight glittering on the waves lapping the shore, it’s quiet, almost like a scene in a postcard. Your eyes land on Ajax on the blanket, Hugo at his feet.

You swallow at the sight of the corded muscle of his bare back, freckled shoulder tinged pink with the kiss of the sun. Just when the edges of panic creep towards you as you look for Nikolai, you spot him sleeping in his father’s arms, dozing off without a care. 

He blinks groggily when Milena calls for him, and the way his soft cheeks lift off the skin of his father’s shoulder reminds you of a flower as it blooms.

And it solidifies what you already know, that your twins were born to be in his arms, that whatever is between you and their father, they were made to fit into the shape of him just like they were for you. That, no matter how unwilling you are to let the beautiful man with fiery hair back in, fate has divined two tangible amalgams of your souls; his and yours. 

When Ajax next returns a few weeks later, you bring him out into the clearing after the twins are in bed without a word. He will stay for a week this time which gives you ample time to create the qilin and recover from the effects.

“Couldn’t you have done it during the day?”

He doesn’t know the details of the creation process; you do not want to explain. A petty part of you also feels like giving him a scare would be satisfying payback.

“You know, you really do seem like a witch like this.”

He grins when you glare, and you roll your eyes and adjust the placement of stones on the two piles of forest matter. 

“The mystery is killing me!”

“You’ll live,” you sigh, clambering up from where you kneel on the grass.

He shrugs, switching the lantern he holds to his other hand.

“You know they wake up at seven thirty,” you start, “breakfast, bathtime, then a walk with Hugo. Letters and shūfǎ until lunchtime, then toys or playtime outside—a nap afterwards if they need it.”

“Yes, but if you’re doing this at night, you wouldn’t be busy during the day, would you?” he scratches the back of his neck with a tilt of his head. You almost want to kiss his cheek.

“What time is dinner?”

“Wh—half past five—why are you asking me this?” 

“Good,” you say, “tell them I’m really sick, but I’ll be fine.”

“What?” he huffs, “what the hell are you talking about?”

“It’ll be about four days,” you add, and then you bring your hands up before the soon-to-be equine beasts and let power flow from your fingertips. Your vision glows, casting a soft green light onto Ajax’s perplexed face.

It takes a minute, and then you feel the surge, as if your organs had been emptied for a split second before being returned to you. The heat comes, and then you make a whimpering noise of pain before all fades.

What the hell?

Ajax catches you as you fall, the dendro constructs coming to life after the last lick of power from your hands possesses them. 

What? 

Why did you do that? Why did you tell him so little? What is he supposed to tell the twins? Does he take you to your bed? Do you need a change of clothes?

He was so pleased with the notion of you relying on him for help with the twins that he didn't even think to ask why exactly you would be unavailable—it seemed entirely unlike you. If he didn’t know you any better, he would have thought that you were going on a date. Even then, he couldn't have guessed that it was this.

Ajax curses under his breath as he wrangles you into his hold, the dead weight of your slumbering body against him. He takes you back up to the house, throwing one last look at the qilin who are canvassing the area (he definitely isn’t imagining them giving him the stink-eye) and then opens the front door into the warm space of the living room. 

Hugo barks in indignation and Ajax shushes him in fear of the noise waking the twins. 

He climbs the stairs with you still limp in his arms and pushes his way into the darkness of your bedroom. It’s the first time he’s been in it.

He turns the lights on and doesn’t give himself time to survey the room before he brings you to your bed. It’s a double bed pushed against the windowed wall, the mattress sinking as he gingerly lays you onto the plush material. Your skin is freezing to the touch but you’re sweating like it’s sweltering, your eyebrows knitted in unconscious pain. 

What the hell did you just do? 

Ajax is not well-versed in the art of animatronics, even less so when that crosses over to things like elemental magic and alchemy. Your pulse is somewhat weak, but your breathing is steady enough that he knows you will be okay. He is starting to feel really bad for killing them that first time. Oh well, you live, you learn.

“Mama?”

Oh shit. 

“Milena!” he says with the hope that she cannot sense his panic.

“What are you doing?” she says. 

“Why are you awake?”

“You never answer me,” she huffs.

His eyes soften, “hey, I’m sorry little snowflake.”

She frowns.

“Your mama got really sick, so I had to put her to bed,” he replies earnestly. “She’ll be okay, alright? Why don’t we get you back to bed?”

Her frown deepens, “I want mama.”

“I’m sorry,” he says gently, “she’s really really sick right now. She told me to take care of you guys.”

“Did she cry?”

“Huh?”

“She cries a lot,” the girl adds.

Do you? In all the years he has known you, he doesn’t recall any instance where you cried in front of him. It’s been six years, Ajax, a lot of things have changed .

“You don’t need to worry about that, Milly,” he says.

“That’s what she says too,” she huffs. “I want mama.”

Ajax sighs, looking between his daughter and your slumbering form. 

“Come here, snowflake,” he says, holding out his arms.

Milena furrows her brows, rubbing at her sleepy eyes.

“I’ll help you up,” he smiles.

She hesitates a moment before conceding, letting him pick her up and tuck her gently in beside you on the soft bed.

“I’m going to go stay with your brother, but if you need me, just shout, alright?” he whispers.

“Mama doesn’t like shouting,” she replies.

“I’ll keep it between us,” he winks.

Ajax brushes the strands of your hair away from your face, feeling the temperature of your forehead before he gives Milena a reassuring smile, turning off the lights and slipping out of the room.

He goes to sit at the edge of the twins’ bed where Nikolai sleeps, watching the steady rise and fall of his son’s chest. He does not know when he falls asleep, but he wakes again with the boy curled into his embrace.

Chapter Text

There’s something there!

See, Milena wasn’t imagining it. The way he looks at you, the way he touches you gently. 

You sleep like the dead all night, but Milena doesn’t mind because your presence is all she needs. When she wakes up, she can already smell breakfast… but you are still sleeping. 

She hears chatter downstairs, so she climbs down as deftly as she can so as not to wake you (at this rate she isn’t even sure if you’d wake for a tornado) and makes her way to the kitchen. She walks the familiar path down the corridor, the creaky narrow stairs, and she comes upon a scene of her treacherous twin brother sharing in laughter with the very man she cannot stand.

What comes next is the aromatic scent of the rich jewelry soup that hits her nose and inspires her stomach to rumble with hunger. 

“Good morning, Milena,” Ajax smiles when he notices her.

“Milly!” the traitor runs into her, wrapping his arms around her in a good-morning hug.

She hugs him back, obviously, but she doesn’t fail to stare suspiciously at the man ladling steaming soup into their little bowls. He’s even gotten her breakfast bowl right, ugh!

Ajax sits them down at the dining table, placing each of their plates of rice and bowls of soup down on the placemats and laying cutlery down neatly beside them. Milena will not admit that she likes being doted on like this. She doesn’t want to admit that she likes how high up she is when he carries her and she doesn’t want to admit that she likes the gifts he brings each time he returns.

Once everyone is settled down, she expertly spoons heapings of tofu and vegetables onto her bed of fragrant rice and ignores Ajax’s watchful gaze. 

“Be careful, it’s hot,” he says, tucking into his own breakfast.

She takes a bite and… it tastes exactly how you make it.

She squints suspiciously at the man, and then she looks at the kitchen drawer where you keep your recipe book. 

“Did mama teach you cooking?” Nikolai asks in her stead. 

Ajax laughs, “this recipe, yes, but I also taught her a few too.”

“Like what?” her brother says through a mouthful of rice.

“Have you guys had vareniki ?”

Milena pauses, and Nikolai’s eyes widen into saucers. 

“Well, I taught your matusya how to make them,” he tells them. 

What? Those delightful, fluffy and perfect little dumplings are from this guy? Her and her twin’s favourite-ever food? Milena could hardly believe it. 

The rest of the day passes as it always does, save for the fact that Ajax takes care of her and her twin in your stead, and he talks a lot more than you do. 

Milena likes them, his stories, but she wouldn’t admit it quite yet. She likes to hear about what you did in Liyue and how you lived before you came to Fontaine, it’s her way of piecing together the tapestry of her mother to make sense of the intricacies you rarely let her and Nikolai in on because they’re ‘still babies’. 

This man Ajax, her papa if she’s being technical, is her bridge to you.

Mama hasn’t been out of bed in two days, and Nikolai is very worried. 

You’re always up before them, even that one week when they were very little when you seemed to be very sick. He wonders if the same thing is happening now; he hopes not. You always pretend to be strong, which is why he does not understand why you wouldn’t let him be the strong one for once. He and Milena (and now Ajax!) can protect you, and you won’t ever have to be worried about anything.

He’s only gotten to see you a few times since you’ve woken up, and he and his twin sister are left to hang out with their papa. Nikolai is sad because he wants to learn a new song on the èrhú but you are so sick that he barely sees you awake. He doesn’t like how it makes him feel to see you so pallid and weak, but Ajax takes very good care of you.  In fact he is greatly comforted knowing that the ginger man has Hydro magic and can protect you with it; he wants to be just like that when he grows up.

Nikolai is still unsettled by your frailty, though.

Ajax loves you, Nikolai thinks it is very obvious. He looks at you the way Milena looks at worms, and she loves worms. That must mean that he loves you, and Milena said babies come from love, which must mean that he and his twin sister were made from the love between you two. He’s their papa for sure. 

That doesn’t matter so much to Nikolai as much as he can sense that there is something between you and Ajax, and he often makes you smile, and Nikolai loves it when you smile. He wants you to be able to smile all the time, so maybe Milena was right in saying that having a papa will be what makes their mama happy.

Plus, Ajax is fun. He is kind and his stories are exciting and Nikolai very much enjoys his company. When he told the twins a month ago that he’s been in quite a few plays, Nikolai could barely contain himself—what a cool papa!

What’s more, everything he does is so fun. When they all go out for Hugo’s morning walk, he teaches them tidbits about the art of sword fighting in Morepesok (Nikolai thinks you might not like it so much, but Ajax explains how it is much like a dance). Nikolai can’t believe how big the world is, and he can’t believe the man who is supposed to be his papa has been everywhere in it.

After he cooks them a nice stew for dinner today, carrots and potatoes and really tender meat, Ajax offers them a piggyback ride upstairs for their bath.

Mama always says that they should be able to do things on their own. Unless they are very sleepy or very sick, they’re okay to walk up the stairs by themselves. It’s okay to ask for help when you need it, but why would you have to bother someone else if you can do it on your own? 

“I can walk,” Nikolai says to the man.

“I didn’t ask whether you could walk, Kolya,” Ajax smiles, “I asked whether you wanted a piggyback ride.”

Nikolai looks at his sister then.

“We can go on our own,” she answers matter-of-factly. 

“So you don’t want a piggyback ride?”

The twins pout at the same time, not understanding why the man would offer to help them up the stairs when they are perfectly capable of doing so themselves.

“Put it this way,” he says, a hand on his hip, “a piggyback ride isn’t just to carry you upstairs, it can be for fun. You can also pretend I’m a horse—or a ship, even a rocket!”

Milena furrows her brows in confusion, and Nikolai tilts his head to the side.

“So we can have a piggyback whenever?” he asks unsurely.

Something in the adult’s eyes changes, but he is not sure what exactly it is. 

“Of course,” he pauses, “I’m your papa.”

“U-um, then can I please have a piggyback ride?” Nikolai purses his lips, averting his gaze.

“All aboard the Ajax express!” 

He kneels down, facing away from the twins with his arms out at the ready, and Nikolai hesitates for a moment before he climbs on. 

“C’mon Milly,” Nikolai beckons to his twin.

She pouts, “I can go myself.”

“Alright, but you can always ask if you change your mind,” Ajax says before he makes a whirring noise like a machine, then he takes off up the stairs really fast.

Nikolai giggles all the way up, his belly hurting from how much fun he had in just a few seconds. 

Yeah, his papa is very cool.

When Ajax visits you after the twins are in bed, you are awake. 

“Free me from this suffering,” you say when he approaches, your voice rough as sandpaper.

He chuckles, “nah, that means I’ll have to give the twins back.”

You turn your head to the side, cheek hitting your pillow softly.

“They’re asleep,” he says, pouring you a glass of water. “They miss you, but they’re happy and healthy, so stop being a worrywart.”

You’ve definitely seen better days, Ajax thinks. Despite having slept for basically twenty-four hours and being in bed for the past two days, you still look like you could sleep for another three. You chug the water as he goes downstairs and gets you a serving of leftover stew and, despite your glare, spoon-feeds it to you anyway. 

You do not say much save for asking after the twins some more, your eyes fluttering shut as soon as he sets the bowl down on the bedside table. He shakes his head, watching the movement of your slow breaths. 

“You’ll get indigestion like this,” he whispers, a hand brushing your hair aside. He stops himself before he leans in, almost wanting to kiss your forehead on instinct. 

Ajax goes back downstairs to get ready for bed with a lingering fire at the tip of his fingers.

And the next few days go just like that. He takes care of his kids, cooking for them and chatting at breakfast, braiding their hair and sitting with them as they do the homework you’ve set for them. His heart is bursting with joy whenever they ask him for stories, whenever they want him to help them climb rocks or cross over puddles, and he is content merely to help them have their evening bath.

“When will I have a real beard?”

Ajax chuckles at his son’s question, “when you become an adult, little prince.”

The twins’ bath has an abundance of bubbles today because Ajax had poured a little too much soap into the warm water. Milena has been gathering handfuls of soap suds and shaping it into different beards and mustaches on her brother’s face and they giggle at each new one.

“Ajax, do you have a beard?” Milena asks him suddenly, narrowing her eyes.

“I could if I wanted to,” he replies, “but people prefer me when I shave.”

“Oh! Oh! Can I help?” Nikolai offers.

“Help me shave?”

His boy nods, and even his daughter looks intrigued at the idea. 

“Alright, you can help me shave tomorrow—but only if you can get ready for bed quickly!”

The twins squeal at his playful threat and rush to wash themselves of soap before letting him lift them out of the bath, bundling them in their towels before helping them put on their plush pyjamas. They go say goodnight to you as Ajax brings you dinner, and his heart warms when he comes back into your room and sees his twins curled up in their mother’s embrace. 

When he finally pries them away for bed, Ajax tells them the story of Andromeda (which Nikolai is enthusiastic about because of Perseus’ role in her story), the princess (that one gets Milena’s attention) who is offered as a sacrifice to appease an ancient god of the sea. Her fate is beyond her grasp and she is chained to a rock awaiting the jaws of a sea monster when the hero Perseus falls in love with her and rescues her by slaying the beast. 

“Yay,” Milena says sleepily, “she didn’t have to be a sha-crifice.”

“That’s right, snowflake,” Ajax smiles. “She was saved just in time.”

That is when he feels little hands grasp his, playing with his fingers. He turns to look at his son who yawns before he speaks.

“Ajax, you love the ocean, right?” he says quietly.

“Yes, little prince, why?”

“Does the ocean still kill you if you love it?”

The ocean is unforgiving. Endless in its indiscriminate stretch across the world, and equally endless in the way it consumes. 

He still remembers the visceral fear in his father’s eyes at eight years old, when he had stumbled down to the darkening beach of Morepesok. Ajax had toddled down to the tides, excited by the mere sound of sizzling seafoam as the water crashed into the sandbank. The air was crisp with sea salt and he recalls the magnetic song of the tides, calling for him and his little feet. 

He remembers the ground disappearing from underneath him as he neared the very edge of the water, realizing that his father had snatched him from the jaws of an unforgiving force of nature. Tato said nothing, but to this day Ajax remembers the sheer terror with which he looked at him, the way his arms wrapped so tightly around his little torso. 

“Water can be very unpredictable, Kolya.” 

“It’s okay,” Nikolai says, “I’ll save you.”

Ajax chuckles, bidding them both goodnight.

His daughter yawns, “night night.”

“Love you papa,” his son murmurs sleepily, squeezing his hand.

And suddenly, Ajax feels his beating heart in his very chest. 

Recovery is taking longer than you had hoped and you are unsure whether it is because you are out of practice or that is just how this type of magic works. You can’t even keep the wards up, the necklace you usually wear around your neck abandoned on your bedside.

The twins have been flitting in and out of your bedroom, sometimes to nap with you and sometimes to show you their letters or mathematics. You sense their worry, but you tell them that they do not need to do such a thing because you will be just fine. 

Your energy is coming back to you, limbs no longer heavy and sounds no longer overwhelming. You finish the warm bowl of hearty shchi Ajax made with the twins and brought to you, reaching for a book to pass the time whilst you digest your food.

The door creaks open slowly, and you watch as the tall man makes his way to you, sitting at the very foot of the bed silently, leaning forward over his knees. He rests his elbows on his thighs, pressing his face into his hands.

“Ajax?”

His shoulders start to shake. 

“Ajax, what happened?” you set your book down, inching closer behind him on the mattress.

He gives no indication that he hears you, but you hear his soft sobs, the heels of his palms digging into his eye sockets.

“Ajax—”

“They’re so small.”

You pause, anxiety melting into sympathy. 

“Oh gods, they are so small.”

Your gaze softens, hand reaching out to stroke his back. You let him cry, resting your temple on the plane of his shoulder as his ragged breathing slows.

“I know,” you say softly, “I know.”

Ajax lifts his head, turning around, and you survey his red-rimmed eyes and his wet cheeks. He bites his wobbling lips as you beckon him into an embrace.

“Niko called me papa,” he says with a watery voice.

You wrap your arms around him, rubbing a soothing pattern into his shoulder.

“You are his papa,” you reply. 

He hiccups, fingers bunching up the fabric of your pyjamas.

“Your cheeks get red just like theirs when they cry,” you say, smiling against his hair. “You know, when they were born, they were barely the length of your forearm.”

“Oh gods,” he sobs into your shoulder, “was it scary?”

You could almost see it, when they were sleeping soundly in their swaddles, only a few hours old, the way he would cradle them, the way he’d look at them as if they were the very stars in the universe and how he’d look at you the same way. He’d cry, probably, and he’d never take his eyes off them, wouldn’t let you lift a finger either.

“How small they were?”

“Yes,” he says, “and all this, doing it alone.”

You hum, “yeah.”

“Was it terrifying?”

You were frightened, both leading up to the day they were born and each day afterwards. You sometimes find yourself still scared of messing up, of hurting them so irreversibly that that mark on their soul will follow them forever.

You laugh, “yeah, it was. But I had Olga, and I had Hugo.” 

You remember finding the pale white puppy behind some crates near the House, his little tail wagging excitedly when he saw you. You had picked him up, rested him on the swell of your belly and the little thing nuzzled into your chest and refused to move for the rest of the day. Olga gave you a surveying look when you had brought him home and drew him a little bath in the sink, but she said nothing as he slept beside you nightly and followed you everywhere. You think she holds affection for the canine thing too.

“I’m sorry I wasn’t there.”

You shake your head, cupping his wet cheek and coaxing his head up so you can look at him, the red tip of his nose and the glassy blue of his eyes, freckles across his teary cheek that you so want to kiss.

“You’re here now,” you say.

“No, I really am sorry,” he confesses, “I’m sorry for what I did to Liyue, your home. I—I know I was too arrogant to listen that day, and I lived thinking I had killed you, and it led us here.”

We have all the time in the world for that when I get back , he had said when you tried to tell him that you needed to talk to him. 

He leans in, forehead pressing against yours. You feel his breath fanning the bow of your mouth and you stroke your thumb across his cheek absentmindedly. 

For a moment you imagine if things were different. Had you told him, would he still have used the Sigils of Permission? Would he instead have tried to defy gods and ended up getting killed for it? Would a shackled life have destroyed him from within?

Was it fair to expect his acquiescence?

“I’m sorry I wasn’t there to massage your feet and read to your belly and hold your hand when you were scared and—”

“Hey,” you laugh, “I know, Ajax. I know.”

You know him, you know his sense of responsibility to his family, the guilt he feels that he is a free spirit who can only feel restless when he is settled for too long, the things that haunt him and the inhibitions that weather him. You know that the lost time with his twins eats him alive—he doesn’t even need to voice it because you see it in the mere way he looks at them.

“I know you do, I just love y—” his eyes widen and he clears his throat, “I just wish I was there.”

He was going to say that he loves you.

And the thing is, you would have said it back so easily. You love him so much that it takes hold of your throat, so much that you feel you are seized by it when his azure-blue eyes land on you, that you are afraid your tongue will only be able to spell out to him that very simple fact that you love him and you love him and you love him. You have never stopped.

A tear rolls down his cheek and you wipe it away.

“Nikolai’s first word was mama,” you offer.

Ajax’s expression twists again, you imagine he is pursing his lips because he is trying to stifle another bout of tears.

“And our Milly?” he asks.

You grin, “Hugo, though it sounded more like oo-go.”

His soft laughter warms you.

“When did they start weaning?” he asks.

“Six months,” you say, “they didn’t get much into it until about eight months old, though.”

He chuckles, “were they good eaters?”

“Oh yeah,” you huff a laugh, “I had sore nipples for months—they were both biters.”

“Just like their papa,” he teases, and though you roll your eyes, you cannot help the mirth that creeps into the corners of your mouth.

Before long you are sprawled out on top of the blanket with Ajax adjacent to you, recounting stories about his twins’ infancy up until now. You drink in the way the skin of his face moves with every burst of laughter, the way he listens diligently to the details and repeats them to himself under his breath. That same creature returns, it probably has never left, the one that tells you over and over to kiss him; you hear it in the tissue of your lungs.

You tell him about how Nikolai was the first to walk, how he hit his head trying to pirouette when he was two and the sound was so loud you feared the House of the Hearth would hear it, how Milena once spontaneously transcribed the entirety of a book of toddler fables with your calligraphy brush, how they both talked before they walked.

Ajax runs his fingers up your wrist absentmindedly as you speak, curving into the dip of your palm, linking his hand with yours. You shiver.

You tell him that Milena has been obsessed with the idea of having a papa since she was three which makes her strange caution now a little funny. You tell him Nikolai was ambivalent before, but the boy is now taken by him—you think your son would follow his father anywhere and you don’t tell him that that notion makes your chest tighten with anxiety.

But, you’d like to think that this is okay. Him, here like this, it almost makes you think that you have all the time in the world.

You don’t know when you are lulled into sleep, but you awaken tucked soundly under the blanket, your head resting on your pillow and the smell of breakfast in the air.

Ajax has siblings aplenty, but he never knew that taking care of two five year-olds would be this difficult. Each time he prepares a meal, tidies the kitchen, does the laundry, watches over the twins’ writing practice and even when he’s supervising their playtime, he thinks of how you must have felt having to do it on your lonesome all these years. Abyss below, Teucer alone at five was already a handful even with the rest of the family there; he can’t imagine that you were simultaneously on the run, too.

He recalls that dawn after he first saw his twins, when in your anger you had told him about their colic. You know what they like, what they hate, what they need, and he shall commit them all to memory too, as he had in the way he loved you—in the way he loves you still.

“Where’s Milena?” Ajax questions in the evening lull.

You’re back on your feet and you insist on doing the chores despite him pointing out that you’re still swaying slightly when you stand. That’s where his daughter gets her stubbornness. 

As soon as dinner was over, you chased everyone out so you could wash up; Ajax thinks it’s a mother thing. 

“Outside,” you say, not looking up from the pile of dishes, “she’s having her ‘Milly time’, Hugo’s with her.”

He makes for the front door.

“I would advise against disturbing her,” you warn.

“Yeah! Milly gets real angry papa,” Nikolai says from his place at the table, still working on his shūfǎ , a glance at the paper tells Ajax he’s trying to write the character for ‘turn’. That’s a big one for a five year old .

He is reminded of the Liyuen poems that you used to transcribe with your own mastery of the skill that you would then leave on his desk. Delicate little things, litanies of love and longing that you dared not utter out loud.

Ajax shrugs, “I’ll be quiet as a mouse.”

He opens the door to the chilly night air, glancing to where his daughter sits alone on the porch bench, Hugo watching at her feet. She sits with her legs dangling off the edge, looking out into the twilight woods. The two qilin are patrolling the area soundly.

He says nothing as he approaches, taking a seat next to her on the bench. He reaches down to pat Hugo on the head before getting comfortable, leaning back.

A few minutes of cricket-song passes before she speaks, “it’s Milly time.”

“Yup,” he says.

“That means it’s quiet,” she adds and it’s all Ajax can do not to gush over her adorable scolding voice.

“I don’t recall saying a word,” he replies, eyes following an owl flying into the branches of a maple tree.

He senses her furrowing her cute little brows, huffing and crossing her arms. He turns to her and he is struck by the thought that she looks just like you like this.

A strong gust of wind blows through the forest, ruffling the treeline and blowing leaves into the sky. Ajax feels the wind on his cheeks and he closes his eyes, the earthy scent of the air flooding his olfaction. He so loves the woodlands; its tranquility.

“I like it as well,” Milena confesses.

Ajax turns to her with a small smile, tilting his head in a silent question.

“Forest smell,” she says.

His smile stretches. There she is, his little romantic daughter.

“I want to stay here,” she tells him sternly.

“Why wouldn’t you be able to stay, snowflake?” Ajax questions. 

“You’re gonna take mama away.”

At this, his eyes widen. 

“Like when the prince takes the princess away,” she says sadly.

“Milena,” he frowns, “your mama isn’t going anywhere.”

He watches his daughter start to cry and a piercing pain unfurls in his heart.

“I wanna be with mama,” she wails, “don’t take mama away!”

“Milly, hey,” he reaches out cautiously, “come here.”

The little girl throws herself at him, sobbing into his arms as he wraps her up away from the cold. He presses a kiss to her head, stroking his daughter’s back as he rocks her back and forth in the cradle of his embrace. And for a moment he thinks that it is surreal, that he gets to hold a child he never thought he could have, would not be permitted by the heavens to have, in his very arms; it almost brings him to tears.

“You know, my little snowflake,” he hums into her soft copper-tinged hair, “I’m your papa, that means I have to protect you, and your big brother, and your mama.”

She hiccups.

“That means I’ll do anything for you, princess,” he smiles, “I promise, okay? And promises in Snezhnaya, they’re taken very seriously.”

He feels her little fingers grip onto his shirt, bunching up the fabric with all her might. 

“D’you love mama?” she cries.

Yes, yes, yes. He could sing litanies of it, could wring the light out of the sun and scorch your name with it into the very earth, could swallow the world whole and still taste only you in his teeth. 

He does not need to think about it, “yes, I do, Milly. I love your mama so very much.”

Yes, in the most human way he has ever felt, he loves you. He loves you for the way you know him, for the way you see him, for the way you look at him. Not as the Eleventh, not Tartaglia, not Childe, just Ajax.

“You don’t have to worry about anything, baby, alright?”

Ajax turns to the door when he hears it creak open, your concerned face peaking through to survey the situation. He almost holds his breath lest you can feel the remnants of his confession to his and your daughter expel from his lungs. Milena keeps her head tucked in his chest, her shoulders still trembling. 

Hugo gets up, trodding towards you and sitting obediently at your feet. You look like you want to intervene, but the more you watch, the more your face relaxes. Ajax gives you a smile, smoothing down Milena’s wind-swept hair.

You sigh, mouthing a let her sleep before you let Hugo in and quietly close the door.

His little girl hiccups quietly after a few minutes pass, “can I call you papa too?”

Ajax’s heart swells like the flowers that bud and bloom endlessly in the throes of spring.

Chapter Text

Zapolyarny Palace smells like winter. 

Not the cozy, spicy smell of home when the hearth is lit and carols are sounding, but the frigid and musty kind that chills you to the bone. Official duties rarely last so long at the Tsaritsa’s residence, most meetings taking place in a day with the Harbingers dispersing soon after (they could never tolerate each other for long, anyway).

Ajax is lucky enough to not usually be caught in any of the crossfire of his coworkers’ bickering, though it has not evaded him that he owes Arlecchino a favour that she is able to claim at any moment (though he thinks she automatically owes him one for her prior transgression). Other than that, the relationships between the Harbingers are quiet, which is of course because of the nature of their distance as representatives to each nation. It’s quiet, though, that’s what matters. 

However, these past two weeks have been unprecedented. 

His comrades might as well start throwing food at each other—a food fight would make all their tireless arguments more worthwhile to watch unfold.

The Captain remains in Natlan, whilst the rest of the Harbingers prepare for the imminent arrival of the gnosis. Ajax catches wind of the Traveler’s hand once again, and he is distracted from the current discussion in the ridiculously large hall the meeting occupies. He imagines Capitano in a showdown with the Traveler and Paimon and he is driven to jealousy by that mere thought alone. Damn them and damn their ability to catch every strong fighter in Teyvat in their web!

“Tartaglia,” The Doctor (or what Ajax assumes is him) says, startling him out of his fantasies of battling his superior. 

“Il Dottore,” Ajax says airily, “what did I miss?”

Ajax imagines The Doctor narrowing his eyes under that beaked mask, surveying him and measuring him up against an imaginary torture rack in his strange mind or something of the sort. 

“What do you think?”

“About?” 

Pantalone sighs, “troops along the North-Western border.”

His coworker gestures to the map laid out on the table, and Ajax takes note of the figurines representing squads of soldiers spread out on the leftward area. His eyes skip on his hometown.

“That area does not need another platoon,” he scoffs, pointing to the mountainous terrain.

“Yes, they do,” The Regrator replies.

“All of those towns along the North-Western border are fishing communities,” Ajax says incredulously, “half of them are already crawling with soldiers.”

“The truth is that we must prepare for war, Tartaglia,” the black-clad man fixes him with a surveying look over the rim of his glasses. “That means securing all routes in and out of the nation.”

Ajax looks at the fifteen miniature figurine soldiers arranged on the topography of his hometown, each representing five Fatui. He ought to pocket one at the meeting’s end, Nikolai would adore it. He snuffs out the thought as quickly as it came, though. 

At the sight of the sandy borders, Ajax is overcome with longing. He almost smells it, the salty sea air that the wind blows in from the icy waters. He could see it, too, the pale snowy shore. He thinks of his children.

“Tartaglia is correct,” Arlecchino says in that bored voice of hers and, praise the Almighty Tsaritsa, she’s actually agreeing with him. “Though the area is a major hub of nautical transport, the mountainous terrain that surrounds it only gives us the advantage, not an invading enemy.”

“Besides, we are only hazarding a guess that other nations will retaliate,” he supplies, “that gives us no right to increase militant power in majority civilian areas.”

The implication that it might not be nations at all hangs in the air, the threat of higher beings, of divinity, like an axe suspended.

“A storm is brewing, Tartaglia,” Columbina says, and her haunting voice sends a chill down his spine.

Pulcinella hums, “it will do them well to get more used to the cold, if anything.”

“Fontainian authorities have recently quelled an arms-smuggling ring,” Arlecchino adds, “there is unrest along the borders, it would make more sense to station troops there instead.”

At the mention of Fontaine, Ajax shifts ever-so-slightly and he prays to all things good that none of his coworkers noticed it. He thinks The Knave’s eyes flit towards him for a split second, but even his quick instincts say he may have imagined it.

He tunes the rest of the meeting out and before long, each Harbinger filters out of the room one-by-one after Pierro’s dismissal, avoiding each other like the plague. He ought to ask for the meeting minutes to be sent to his office so that he could read them later.

“Tartaglia,” The Damselette's dreadful voice draws Ajax’s gaze to the veiled eyes of the woman suddenly perched on the Tsaritsa’s empty dais and he sends a prayer into every direction of the wind.

She never, ever approaches him first. Ever. 

“Columbina! I haven’t seen much of you lately,” he laughs good-naturedly.

He has never cared to, and he sure as hell isn’t about to start.

“Our little family…” she says, her voice bright, “family is important, is it not?”

His mouth goes dry, “yes, very much so.”

“Do you visit family often, Vanguard?”

“I try to, but you know how busy we get.”

“Morepesok,” she sings and Ajax’s jaw clenches, “that is the town far away from Fontaine borders.”

Morepesok is a fishing town that does not border any nation because it is in the northernmost point west of Snezhnaya. Yes, it sits directly opposite where Fontaine borders the nation if it were southward, but that isn’t how you’d really describe the place. 

It’s no secret that Ajax hails from Morepesok, Pulcinella himself often visits his family there in his stead; though it is more a thinly-veiled threat than comradial affection. But, he has nothing to do with Fontaine, at least not that anyone should know of.

The Tsaritsa allows her Harbingers freedom in every which way, including their relationships, so long as it does not interfere with their work. Regardless of this, Ajax does not trust any of them so much as to be able to boast about his newfound family hidden in the comfort of the Marcotte woods.

Ajax watches as The Damselette moves from the dais, floating without another word out of the cavernous throne room. He breathes out a sigh of relief. 

“Childe.”

Pulcinella’s voice makes him jump in the thick mass of his own fur coat. The Rooster reveals himself, shuffling back into the frigid hall to stand before Ajax.

“Tonia is worried,” the old man rests his two hands on his ornate cane, “you have visited less often.”

Ajax chuckles, “you know how it is, Pulcinella, work is work.”

“Yes,” The Rooster hums, “indeed.”

“Thank you for keeping them well for me, as always,” he says, “I’ll visit soon.”

“Family is important, Childe.”

He laughs, goosebumps on his skin, “don’t I know it.”

With that, he bids his superior farewell and turns on his heel out of the eerie throne room, the length of his spine shivering with the strange encounters that followed one after the other. 

Ajax purses his lips, apologizing to you in his head before he heads to his office.

He’s late.

Milena and Nikolai won’t stop asking after him, and every second that passes by without any sign of Ajax makes your stomach churn. You’d skin him if he dared to die on you and his twins.

It doesn’t help that they are ill. The sudden turn of the weather in recent days has done what it usually does to the usually frail boy’s immune system and he’s been feverish for days, Milena not faring any better.

You put them to bed with the story of the kinnari Manohara and Prince Sudhana, a Sumero-Liyuen folktale. The lovers are torn apart when the prince is in the midst of battle and Manohara is threatened with death in their kingdom. She flees back to her kinnari kingdom where her people are, and it takes Sudhana seven years, seven months and seven days of trials in order to find her again. Nikolai’s favourite part is the prince’s battle against the Yaksha, Milena’s is when they get married the second time.

Ajax was supposed to be back in the afternoon, three days ago. 

Hugo suddenly jolts up from his spot next to you, his ears flattening against his head. You watch him hop off the couch and make his way to sit obediently in front of the door. The familiar knocks come when you are setting your book down, the cup of tea you made after putting your twins to bed long gone cold. You pad over to unlock the old metal knob.

“They’re in bed,” you say coldly, “you’re late.”

Ajax stands there with his rucksack, his hair damp with the rainfall that hasn’t let up since last week, blood-red jewel of his earring glinting in the evening lamplight. 

“I know,” he says apologetically as he steps inside, “there was something I had to take care of. How can I make it up to you?”

“Just make it home for dinner next time,” you grimace. “They’re sick.”

“What?”

“The twins, they got sick.”

Ajax’s face drops, “what? When?”

“Yesterday,” you sigh, “they kept waiting up for you and they’d wake up early in case you were back. The weather’s been bad, Nikolai went first.”

He does not respond.

“Ajax?”

The Harbinger blinks out of his small stupor, “yeah?”

“Is there something I must know?”

He shakes his head, stepping closer to you. You frown.

Ajax is a skilled liar, someone whose mask comes so naturally; he wears it well too. And yet, you’ve come to know him enough to see through it. 

“I’m sorry,” he says, his endlessly blue eyes boring into you.

“Don’t—” you clear your throat, averting your eyes, “don’t go where I cannot follow, Ajax.”

Your jaw clenches as he nears, watching his feet move closer, and you let his head fall to rest on your shoulder. A shiver runs up your spine at the warmth of his forehead, his soft damp hair tickling the skin of your neck. His hands come up to rest on the small of your back and you take a sharp breath, willing the quickening of your heart to cease its insistent rhythm. 

“Is this okay?” he asks softly. 

You nod. 

His arms move to snake tighter around you, pulling you into a crushing hug. It takes you more than a moment to collect yourself; you hug him back. His embrace makes you think faintly of the warmth of sacrament and you want to kiss him. 

“I’ve missed you,” he whispers, “I’m sorry I was late.”

You don’t say anything, only play with the hair at the nape of his neck. 

“Can I go see them?”

“They’ve been asleep for hours,” you say into the fabric of his jacket. 

“Please? I won’t wake them,” he begs gently.

You concede, “I’ll make you a cup of tea.”

He lifts off your shoulder slowly, running a tender hand down the length of your arm to bring your knuckles up to his lips. He kisses the back of your hand before he lets you go, offering you a small smile before he ascends the creaky stairs up to see his twins. 

You hear him come back down just as you’re letting a stream of honey drip into his mug. His mug now, because he decided that he liked the whale pattern Milena had painted onto it when she was three.

“Hey,” he says when you hand it to him, chamomile and lavender. “Milena’s coughing in her sleep.”

He takes an appreciative smell of the blend before he sits down next to you at the dining table. You absentmindedly clear away the clutter; the books and drawings pushed to the side to make room for their mathematics earlier.

“Yeah, it started yesterday afternoon,” you tell him.

“How have they been otherwise?” Ajax questions after a brief silence.

“The same as always,” you reply, “it was potato-day last week, they made vareniki.”

“Potato-day?” he takes a sip.

You nod, “when the stalks die back, you know the potatoes are ready for harvest. They like to dig for potatoes… They thought you would be there this time.”

“I’ll be there for the next one,” he says.

“Don’t make promises you can’t keep.”

He stiffens, and you let silence settle back in as you stack books on top of one another.

“They decided they really like madeleines,” you offer when your hands are idle. “We went to Café Lutece again.”

“Of course they do,” he chuckles. 

Ajax sets his mug down, reaching a tentative hand out to cup yours. 

“What about you?” he says.

“What?”

“How have you been?”

You bite your lip. 

“I…”

I missed you.

“I’m worried about Milena,” you say, “she doesn’t usually get the worst of it.”

“I’ll go have a look for ingredients tomorrow,” he replies, “I can make borscht.”

“Good idea, there are some cabbages in the garden that need picking.”

“I’ll do that after breakfast,” he says.

You give him a grateful smile, watching him alternate between sips of his tea and rubbing circles into the skin of your hand with his thumb.

“Go take a shower,” you say, grabbing his empty mug.

“Where are the blankets?” he gets up to follow you, a hand scratching the back of his neck.

You hold your breath, your back to him now. He calls your name in question.

“You—um, you can sleep in the bedroom.”

You imagine he presently looks dumbstruck, but you know that the heat you feel in your cheeks will manifest on your skin and you do not dare to turn around to allow him to corroborate your suspicion. 

The ghost of a touch on your hand startles you.

“You don’t have to,” he says gently, “I’m okay on the couch.”

You shake your head, “no.”

“Alright,” he replies, and you take his mug into the kitchen without another word. 

You do not know how long you wash the mug for until the sound of the shower starts, but you somehow decide it’s been sufficiently cleaned and place it on the rack. 

Before heading up for bed, you glance out at Bai and Lian doing their dutiful patrols and lock the front door with a heaved sigh.

Hugo is sitting in the middle of the floor between the couch and the dining table when you turn around. You imagine that were he human, he would have a raised eyebrow.

“Shut up, Hugo.”

You can sleep in the bedroom.

He, Ajax, can sleep in the bedroom. The bedroom. Your bedroom.

He almost slips on the porcelain bath in his daze. 

The hot steam of the shower rises up and leaves a mist over the bathroom mirror, but he doesn’t need to see his full reflection to know that there is a pink flush over his nose and cheeks, dusting his freckled shoulder. 

Should he put on a top? He usually sleeps without his shirt on! 

Wait, you didn’t even say where he’ll be sleeping, is he getting worked up just to find out he’s going to be on a mattress on the floor? 

He puts his hands over his face in an attempt to collect himself. 

Damn it, you make his stomach bundle up all in knots and he doesn’t know what to do. He could fight an army of Abyss Lectors before he’d have the guts to look you in the eye without falling to his knees at the sight of your honey gaze.

“Ajax—”

“Ow!”

“Are you alright?”

No, no he is not alright. Your voice had startled him into hitting his head on the edge of the cabinet mirror above the sink which does nothing to dissuade the climb his heart is making into his throat. 

“Ajax?”

“I’ll be right out!”

“Alright, I’m going to bed.”

Bed. Right, bed.

Once he hastily dresses himself (shirt included, he decides), he shuts off the lights around the cottage, and then he checks on his twins one more time. He holds his breath when he finally turns the doorknob to your bedroom. 

The amber glow of your lamp blankets the space in a lazy warmth. He is reminded of nights you used to fall asleep waiting up for him, when he would tell you that he’d visit but duties at Northland Bank held him back well into the dark hours of the night. He’d get to the house he bought for you and find you in bed with a book, sometimes asleep and sometimes awake, and he’d crawl in beside you, wrap his arms around your waist and kiss you tenderly on your soft hair and let himself doze off to the steady sound of your breath. 

He spends a few minutes captivated by the sight of you like this, the mundane clutter of your room and the way the light rests on the plane of your sleeping face. Your eyes flutter open and he is entirely awed by the way you look at him.

“Is that how you sleep these days?” you say groggily.

He chuckles, taking a few short steps to your bed with a shake of his head. 

You shuffle slightly to let him tuck into the blanket, and he turns to face you, nose inches from yours in the snug space of the mattress. He notices your held breath and a smile makes its way onto his face. He does not know why he was so nervous—being with you is as natural as the way his fingers thrum for battle.

“Goodnight,” you say abruptly, flipping over with your back to him.

He grins wider, reaching over to turn off the lamp and blanketing the room in darkness. Ajax closes his eyes, listening to the sound of your breathing before he allows himself to start dozing off. 

That is until he feels you shuffling, and then it is your warm back against his chest. Ajax stifles a laugh. He leans forward until he finds your ear with his nose, nuzzling into your hair.

“All you had to do was ask, lovely,” he teases.

He brings his arm up, wrapping around your waist and tugging you snug against himself. He tucks his chin into the crook of your neck, inhaling your sweet scent. 

“The twins keep talking about a ‘sword dance’,” you say, “do you happen to know anything about that?”

He draws absentminded patterns into your hip with his thumb and he delights in the way he can feel you shiver under his touch.

“Hm,” he drawls, “I wouldn’t dare to teach them about something like flankirovka.”

The sword-fighting technique of his homeland. 

See, warriorhood and the glories of battle are not for blood and havoc, at least they are not supposed to be. You must respect your opponent, always, lest you find yourself in a trap of hubris. Like he told his children, fighting is like a dance, you practice and hone your skills through discipline, speaking through the blade of your weapon with your opponent. It’s an artform, a medium of communication and cooperation.

You mumble something under your breath.

“What was that?”

“I said,” you say, inching deeper into his embrace, “that it’s fine.”

Ajax grins.

“It’s the essence of you, it’s their culture too,” you yawn, “I think you should teach them.”

He feels a fire blanket the sinew of his beating heart, your words washing over him like the sure brimming feeling of pride. You see him, in the simplest, most bare-bones of ways, you see him beyond the blood and you see him for what he is.

“Alright,” he hums, “anything for you, lovely.”

You huff.

“Goodnight,” he says, smiling into your skin. 

Chapter Text

Nikolai has always had an ear and eye for the arts, much like his father. He acquires songs on the èrhú much quicker than his sister does, though you think that’s partly because she’s too preoccupied with thoughts of what manner of animals she’d like to catch next playtime. You worry whether they will be able to catch up with other kids once they go to school, and you can already hear Ajax’s voice telling you that the twins ‘are only five’ and you grin at the thought.

You are grateful for your freedom to now roam around Fontaine as you please, because the nation has an impressive repertoire of all sorts of operas and theatre performances that you can now take your twins to. The Royal Snezhnaya Ballet visited the Opera Epiclese for a week-long series of shows, one of which Ajax had bought front-row tickets for, for you and the twins.

Nikolai was completely star-struck, eyes twinkling in pure awe at the mastery of the dancers. You were endeared just by watching him try to decide between watching the ensemble of instruments or the dancers on the stage. Milena was much the same, though she definitely kept her eyes on the ensemble for longer.

“You’re pressing too hard right there,” you say to your son now, “hear that?”

“But mama,” he huffs, slouching behind the èrhú, “I’m tired.”

You smile, “alright, alright. You did well today, go play.”

He gets up excitedly, gingerly brushing off the dust from the body of the fiddle, hooking the bow onto the pegs and handing it to his sister. Milena takes it before she replaces him on the seat next to you, and you smile at your daughter as she readies to learn a new song. 

A bead of your necklace warms, the one that lets you know that Ajax is home. 

Home?  

You take your bottom lip between your teeth at the revelation that you consider him part of your life, this life with your twins, and the familiar knocking pattern finally raps against the door which inspires your twins to jump almost five feet into the air.

Milena gives you a look and you acquiesce, taking the instrument from her and watching as she leaps off her seat to follow Nikolai to the door.

“I made it home for dinner,” Ajax beams as steps inside, barely able to put his things down before the twins tackle him in a crushing hug.

You roll your eyes as he lets himself fall back with a dramatic groan about how ‘the mighty beast has been felled!’, and his twins giggle as if it was the funniest thing they’d ever heard. Your heart hammers because though he has been sleeping in your bed each time he has returned as of late, you still have not addressed what it is between you. You also try vehemently to ignore the fact that you want to jump him at every chance you get (but that’s another worry entirely).

After a dinner of an assortment of jadevein tea eggs, rice, and tender stir-fried meat and vegetables, Ajax starts to rummage around his rucksack as the twins have a share of rice pudding for dessert. He gingerly procures a wooden box with a delicate hasp latch sealing its mouth shut. The twins tilt their head in wonder, curious little feet kicking in anticipation and whispering conspiratorially with their cheeks still stuffed with pudding.

You scold them about speaking with their mouths full and they diligently chew and swallow as Ajax comes back to the dining table.

“This is something to share,” he says, looking between his twins, “I think you’ll like it.”

He opens the box and you smile when you see a small lever on its side. An illustration sits under the lid, one of Feiyun Slope during its vibrant nightlife. The deep red of the buildings warmed by the light of the many busy establishments makes your heart squeeze in longing.

“What is it?” Milena inquires, taking one end of the box as her twin handles the other.

“A music box,” you supply, “you have to turn it, and then it’ll give you a song.”

Your children make a simultaneous noise of awe before Ajax reaches for the lever, giving it a few cranks. A familiar Liyuen song plays, your favourite, and you have to look away because your chest is so giddy that you can sense the very feeling in your fingertips. 

“‘s mama’s song!” Nikolai says.

A bright jazzy number that has always reminded you of the lantern-adorned evenings in Liyue. The senior crowd at Heyu Teahouse would slow-dance to it every night accompanied by the ambience of Liyue Harbour’s amber glow, the music of hustle and bustle below that never failed to make you fall in love with your beloved city. 

“That’s right Kolya,” the boy’s father says, “do you guys wanna dance?”

The twins are obviously more than keen on the idea, hopping off their chairs and taking each other’s hands in their own rendition of a slow-dance to the song they know so well because you have both played and sung it to them since their infancy. 

You feel warm when you look at Ajax whose gaze is already fixed upon you. 

He extends his hand gracefully, “would you honour me with a dance, milady?”

You roll your eyes, but take it anyway.

Your free hand reaches for his shoulder, but a surprised yelp escapes you when he reels you in by your interlocked fingers, spins you around to press his chest to your back and twines his arms around your middle. His chin falls to rest on your shoulder, and he hums a contented sigh, rocking back and forth on his feet and swaying you along with him. 

You repeat to yourself that your heart is completely fine, that you are capable of being normal about this whole ordeal. That is until he starts singing, under his breath, in the shell of your ear. He sings the lyrics to the song and your heart is hammering entirely out of tempo with the beat of the music box.

You focus your attention towards your dancing twins instead, twirling each other around in peals of precious laughter, clasping their hands together above their heads to let Hugo tunnel between them and giggling ever-brighter as he circles around for more. 

“You’re incredible, you know,” Ajax says suddenly, and you shiver, “you made them out of your own flesh and bones, our two babies.”

Oh heavens above, help your poor soul.

“It was a combined effort,” you reply, and you realize too late that you are practically handing the joke to him.

“Oh I sure put in my best effort,” he teases lowly, “though I’m not sure if I really had the intent of making a baby at the time—or two for that matter.”

And you feel a flush at that, the sensual nakedness of his words. Making a baby.

“You—” you take a shaking breath you hope he does not hear, “you go to Liyue Harbour often.”

“Mmhm,” he hums, “it’s our city.”

Mighty Morax, is he doing this on purpose?

Before long, the twins want into the conversation between you and their father, and you are more than grateful for the excuse to wrench yourself away from Ajax lest he feel the fire thrumming beneath your skin.

Your blood is rushing in your ears the whole time the twins exhaust themselves dancing with him, and you are still zoning out as you announce that it is time for their bath. A faint pang of fear strikes you as you watch them clamber onto his back, a grief on loan from a time that has yet to come and you tamp it down like earth atop a coffin. 

You hope this is working.

A rare day comes by when you have to go into the Court of Fontaine alone, and Ajax is left with the twins in the cottage. You’ve finally been able to find time to go to job interviews (despite him telling you that he has ample coffers to sustain you for three lifetimes) and you insisted on also taking Hugo for a check-up at the vet to kill two birds with one stone. 

He can’t find any fault in it, though, he is delighted to have time with his children.

“Sugar, sugar,” Nikolai sings now, summer leaves crunching beneath his boots. 

“Do you make sugar, papa?” Milena asks from where she piggybacks Ajax.

“Not anymore,” he hums, “but where I grew up, we had plenty of sugar trees—but they’re not the same kind as these ones.”

He barely remembers the last time he went sugaring in Morepesok, when his mother’s smile held no fear and his father laughed without caution of his own son.

“There are different kinds of maple trees?” Nikolai exclaims. 

“Absolutely,” Ajax says, “hundreds, probably, and not all of them have sugary sap.”

The twins’ eyes widen into saucers of twinkling awe. Ajax likes to think they are imagining the possibility of such a scope of existence; hundreds and hundreds of maple species.

“But,” he continues, “we usually tap birch trees.”

“Birch trees?” Milena tilts her head and Ajax reaches instinctively behind him to ruffle her hair.

He points to a medium-sized birch downhill, “that one, see?”

“That one has sugar too?” Nikolai asks.

“Yep, and it tastes way different from maple trees,” he replies.

“Can we try it, papa? Please please please, can we?” his son begs.

“We can do both, little prince,” he says. 

The twins cheer and he is reminded of Teucer’s innocence years ago.

“Alright, now who wants to help me tap?” 

“Me! Me! Me!” the pair light up, and he beams because there is no more contentment than what he feels when he is with his twins.

He tells them that they can take turns, that maple trees the size of these ones that have probably lived alongside the forest for years and years can definitely take more than a few taps. He reaches into the bucket stacked on top for the hand-drill, finding a nice spot on the tree trunk to sink its metal mouth into. Sap starts to seep through the hole as soon as he pulls it out, and the twins are abuzz with anticipation. 

Milena looks at him and he nods, and she rushes forth with a spile ready. She pushes the spout in and Ajax hands her the hammer with a cautionary reminder to watch her fingers. She gets about a quarter way through before giving up and he hammers the rest in himself, quickly hooking the bucket onto the body of the spile as thick, clear sap rushes out in a glistening stream under the morning sunlight.

They are delighted by the sound of the liquid echoing against the tin of the bucket, and Ajax beams because his twins are light itself.

Once they tap in a few more spots and all the buckets are covered, Ajax lays out the blanket that you had packed onto the grass, letting the twins help him set up snacks and their reading so that they can have a change of scenery for their learning today. 

The twins love it when Ajax goes on tangents as he assists them (though you often cut it short in favour of them finishing their assigned learning), whether it’s anecdotes or recitations of his favourite plays. He makes a mental note to make sure he keeps an eye out for more performances and shows at the Opera Epiclese, and perhaps he will one day have time to take them himself.

On the way back, Ajax accidentally steps into a puddle of mud. 

The twins reprimand him for being ‘all muddy’ and all he can do is grin when they exchange a glance at his invitation to join him in the puddle. He tells them that they have to at least try having a play in the mud, just to really make sure they don’t like it.

“Mama doesn’t like mud,” Milena says.

“But you haven’t tried,” he challenges.

They do it again, the silent twinspeak, and Ajax tilts his head. 

“Have you ever jumped in mud?” he asks incredulously, and then his jaw drops when his twins shake their heads. 

He promptly sets the buckets of sap down nearby, hands on his hips as he stands in front of them. He holds his hands out and they tentatively join him, before he proceeds to stomp in the puddle, inspiring squeals of delight from the both of them. 

He doesn’t know how long they spend in that part of the forest, but once they are huffing and puffing and entirely splattered with mud all over their mirthful cheeks, he decides to round them (and the abandoned buckets of maple sap) up and haul them back home to get them in the bath before you return. 

Their post-bath nap happens in his embrace, halfway through the reading of The Heron, The Fish and The Crayfish; a short Snezhnayan kazka. Ajax does not move for the whole hour, he just sits in his contentment and watches his twins mumble and shift in their easeful slumber in the cradle of his arms. 

Milena thinks that sugaring is very fun, until it comes time to boil down the sap into syrup. It gets really, really boring then.

That’s why once mama and papa set up the fire and set the huge pot of sap up to boil, the twins are more than happy to be herded up for their bath and bedtime. Milena and her twin brother make quick work of brushing their teeth, because when papa is home, he tells them stories every single night! 

She thinks she ought to be the luckiest girl in the world to have a papa who has so many adventures, who knows so many things. A papa who loves her mama so much, who loves her and her twin so much that she can feel it. It’s the same feeling as when she senses Nikolai’s emotions, the same one as when she can sense yours. 

Her heart is giddy knowing that this is what family is.

“You wanna know something?” papa asks in bed that night.

The twins nod, of course they do.

“When I was your age and we used to make syrup, we made it a different way,” he says.

“You and your mama and papa?” Milena asks, “and all your brothers and sisters?”

Milena has only ever seen them through photos, her family whom she has never met.

“Yup, exactly,” he replies. 

“How did you make it?” Nikolai turns to him with curiosity. 

“Well, Morepesok is so cold even in the spring that it’s freezing at night,” he says, “so we just leave out our sap and the water in it becomes a big block of ice on top and we just pick it up afterwards, that leaves the syrup.” 

“That’s so awesome,” Nikolai says wistfully. 

“Totally, and then we keep doing it every day until the sap gets thick enough, then we just boil it down. But your mama has some incredible tools here, so the pyro power will help us make syrup even faster.”

“Can you show us birch syrup next time?” Milena yawns.

“Of course I can kiddos,” papa says. “You know, birch is so important where your papa is from that our third month is named after it.”

“Really?” 

“Yeah, just like your birthday month means the yellowing of leaves, we name our months after the things that are happening around us.”

“Did you see us on our birthday too?” Nikolai asks, though Milena senses that he’s already halfway to sleep.

Papa is suddenly sad, Milena can see it. She isn’t sure why, because he’s here now and she loves him so much, she cannot imagine what could possibly make him sad. Does he not like their birthday? Was it a sad day for him?

“Why is papa sad?” she asks quietly, “you don’t like birthdays?”

He looks at her then, eyes widening.

“No! It’s not that, lovely girl,” he smiles, running a hand through her hair, “I wasn’t there for your birthday, and I am very sad because I wanted to be there to see you both, to help your mama.”

She furrows her brows, “but you’re here.”

Something in his eyes melt and he leans forward to kiss her forehead. 

“Yes I am, my little princess, I am.”

It’s been almost three years since you moved yourself, the twins, Hugo and all your personal effects into the Marcotte woods. You remember the first year here, when the twins were still lisping on the blanket you’d laid out in the clearing as you tapped the sturdiest maple tree in the grove first. They were bundled up tightly in warm fabrics, playing with Hugo’s fluffy tummy, and they took little interest in what you were doing. That was until the first pearl of sap beaded and fell against the tin bucket, plunk, and then the successive, more strong stream that burst from the trunk of the maple tree. Plunk plunk plunk.

“Are you cold, matusya?” Ajax’s voice turns your head towards him as he approaches the camp.

“I’ll warm up soon,” you reply dismissively, nickname sending shivers down your spine. 

He kisses his teeth, turning around and disappearing inside the house. He returns a moment later with another blanket, wordlessly wrapping the soft fabric around you. You feel a little silly in the mass of fabric in addition to the patchwork scarf already around your neck.

“Can’t have our mama freezing, can we?” 

You sink into the blankets in an attempt to hide the oncoming flush of your face, eyes following him as he settles into his own lawn chair next to you, the firelight dancing in his blue eyes.

A comfortable few minutes pass between him stirring the pot of heavy bubbling syrup, the sound of the crackling fire and the qilin ’s footsteps. You look up at the sky, watching the twinkling stars.

A wind blows and you shiver again.

“Hey,” Ajax says, patting his lap, “come here.”

Your brows knit together.

“It’s not going to kill you, lovely,” he jests. 

After a moment of contemplation, you give in because the cold is more pressing an issue than any sense of shame. You didn’t need to think about it though, really.

You slink out of your lawn chair, standing tentatively before where he sits comfortably in his. Ajax tilts his head like a challenge and you narrow your eyes before you lower yourself down, sitting gently onto his thigh. He doesn’t let you get situated before he wraps his arms around your hips, and you yelp as he pulls you down into the middle of his lap, one arm now around your waist and the other thrown over your legs.

You lean into the soft pad of his chest, cheek resting against him. He perches his chin on your head, and his familiar citrusy fresh-ocean scent allows you to melt into the shape of him. You don’t know how long you stay like this, rhythmic rise and fall of his chest and steady beating of his heart in your ear. The world is silent save for the hooting of owls and the crackling of the fire, the bubbling sap in the metal pot.

“Were they being naughty today?” you ask, your cheek rubbing against the fabric of his coat. “The clothes they wore outside were so dirty.”

He shakes his head, “they’re perfect, our twins.”

You are grateful that he cannot see your face, because you are sure there is a flush on your cheeks as you try to will the quickening of your pulse to cease. Our twins.

“They loved waiting at the bucket and listening to the sap dripping,” he chuckles, “they said it sounds like—”

“Like faeries whispering,” you finish.

“Yeah,” you imagine he is grinning. 

“They are more distracted these days,” you note, “I don’t want them to fall behind in their studies.”

Ajax is silent for a beat, his scarred fingers coming up to tuck a strand of your hair behind your ear before he takes your hand in his. You feel his chin move as he speaks.

“I don’t want to overstep,” he says, “but they’re fine.”

“They have their routine,” you say.

“And the world is still spinning,” he replies with a squeeze of your hand.

“I just want them to have good habits,” you sigh.

“Let them be kids, lovely.”

Oh. 

“You know better than anyone that they’re only five years old,” he adds. “I couldn’t even spell when I was five, and our babies are practicing stylized calligraphy.”

In the midst of rearing them, you had been so intent on feeding and clothing them, providing them with education and skills that you failed to think about what they may simply want. Sure, they have enrichments aplenty, with the variety of playtime and the expanse of the Fontaine countryside at their fingertips—but perhaps you have been too much of a drill sergeant. 

You inhale sharply the woody scent of the fire.

“They’re only going to be this little for so long, baby,” he says, planting a soft kiss onto your hair that almost made you miss the term of endearment. “There’s a whole lifetime for letters and mathematics and whatnot, let them enjoy being in the mud and shouting and all the things a kid ought to do—”

You push up abruptly, hands planting on either side of his firm shoulders, “you let them play in mud?”

Your want of control and your want of safety, constantly needing to not only survive, but also foster an environment in which your twins could thrive, you scarcely allowed them mundanity; any break in routine is a break in your carefully curated life.

“Yes,” Ajax smiles, squeezing your hip. “Yes I did, and they had so much fun.”

Oh.

“And I know they’d love it if you joined them—or at least watched,” he says, coaxing your head forward so that he can press his forehead against yours.

“I want them to grow up to be good kids,” you whisper.

“I know,” he runs the pad of his thumb across your cheek. “They’re brilliant, you’ve made sure of that.”

“When is it enough?” your eyes flit momentarily to his lips, his nose brushing against the bridge of yours.

“You? Or what you’ve done to prepare them for the world?”

“Both.”

“You’re their everything baby,” he says softly, and it’s that damned nickname again, “and they don’t need much more than that. They’re only five and they know how to write characters I’m sure even Zhongli would struggle with.”

You laugh.

“You’re their mama,” he says, and your breath catches on the gentle melt of his gaze. “You’re incredible.”

You feel every inch of you that rests against his skin, the soft plane of his forehead and ticklish tip of his nose ghosting over yours, the indent of his fingers, cup of his palm over your cheek. You think selfishly that there could be a lifetime of this. 

You want a lifetime of this.

“Can I kiss you?” Ajax whispers.

The firelight dances on the curve of his lips and the thick band of his eyelashes glow as if they were born of that very same flame. You want it to envelop you, to reduce you. You are almost inclined to think him something otherworldly; divine. 

Your heart thrums now, sings to you of soft and sweet homecoming. 

“Yes,” you breathe. “Yes, yes—”

He leans in like the moon at an eclipse, closing the minute gap, and you sigh into the kiss as if you were being anointed. His lips are as soft as the kiss of your last parting, six years and you still know the flesh of his mouth as if it were your very own.

The dip of his fingers in your skin inspires electricity down the length of your spine and you straighten, arching into his other hand that snakes around you, pressing you closer by the small of your back, chest against his. Your fingers link around the nape of his neck and you hear a soft sound at the back of his throat as the intensity of the kiss builds. You are lost in it, the wet tender flesh of his mouth and the way it fits against yours, his hands, his hair.

He pulls away barely an inch, calls your name tenderly.

He kisses you again, and then, “I love you.”

Your heart is in your throat.

“You must know, that I never stopped,” he breathes, “that I love you.”

You nod, canting your head to press another kiss to his bewitching mouth.

“Do you know how long I have been waiting to do this?” he asks gently onto your lips. “Is this okay?”

“Yes. Yes, Ajax, I—”

“You don’t have to say anything,” he offers you the hint of a bittersweet smile.

“No,” you swallow, “my Ajax.”

His laugh fans the wetness of your lips and the chill inspires you to kiss him again, allowing warmth to seep deep into muscle and sinew. 

“I love you, Ajax,” you say.

You do not need to think about it; you never have. You love him, that is something you have always known, there is no version of this story in which you do not love him. When you are returned to the earth, there will still be proof of it. It will be in the ground and it will be in the air, every last drop of the sea, it will be in your twins, in their own children if they choose to have any. He is immortal so long as you love him.

“I love you, too,” he answers, dipping to kiss the pulse of your neck, “I love you, I love you, I love you.”

He repeats it like a mantra with every ticklish kiss that he presses to your skin and you decide to abandon the syrup for tomorrow. He does not keep his hands off of you as you fold the chairs, as you drown the campfire and as you put a lid over the pot of not-yet-golden syrup.

“You know,” he leans over you, hands on your hips and mouth on your shoulder blade, “I think I was made for this. To love you, worship you—let me do that tonight, please?”

You turn around, hands in his hair and his arms around your waist, another electric shiver running down the stretch of your arching spine as he kisses your lips again and again. 

He dips to nip at the racing pulse of your neck, “mine,” a kiss, “all mine.”

You flush, fire coursing through the pathways your blood takes to your heart and you pack up between breathless pecks and soft giggles of each other’s names. It sounds a lot like prayer. 

You let him carry you to bed still smelling of kindling, and Ajax presses you to his heart in the wrinkles of twilight. 

Chapter Text

Auntie Olga is a curious woman. Nikolai remembers when she once made them drink this really dark green liquid that tasted more bitter than the medicines you make them when they’re sick. Her hair has grayed the littlest bit more than when he hast saw her, but her strong brows and reassuring hands remain the same as ever as she moves about her kitchen, flitting between her kettle and mortar of herbs and leaves.

He sits in her little apartment in the heart of the Court of Fontaine, playing with Milena atop a play-mat as he listens to the snippets of conversation between you and the older woman about their school. Nikolai is very quite excited to go to school, he'll get to learn so much, and there might even be opportunities to perform plays and ballet too!

Auntie Olga prods you about a man whom Nikolai doesn’t know the name of, but he chances a guess that it’s papa. You have this unconscious bashfulness on your face whenever it comes to him nowadays, and you sport that same look right now as she teases you about ‘some mosquito that is’. Nikolai doesn’t get it, but you groan. It isn’t often he gets to see you like this, more carefree and willing to let someone care for you instead.

There’s been a lot of change recently, Nikolai notes. First of all, you are much less anxious all the time. Nikolai feels it, and he knows his sister does too, the way you let them make mistakes and the way you are less cautious about their movements. 

Most notably though, you and papa kiss each other. Blegh! 

Whether it is in plays or storybooks, Nikolai has never liked the notion of it—it looks gross. He doesn’t mind it as much when it is his mama and papa, because the kiss makes you smile and it makes papa’s eyes even more sweet than they usually are when he looks at you. Besides, you’re always trying to do it secretly, but Nikolai is observant enough to notice it, and so is Milena. 

You are silly though, why would you ever want to hide the way you love papa so much? He sees it just as much as he saw how obviously papa loves you even the very first few weeks of knowing him. 

That night, after you’ve taken them home with a few sachets of herbs and jars of medicine and set the twins and Hugo up for dinner, Nikolai dreams a strange dream.

He sees a boy who looks much like himself standing in his lonesome atop a reflective, still pool of black. The boy seems quite a bit older than him, more a teenager than a little kid, but he is still ensconced in lanky limbs and awkward teeth yet.

“Hello,” Nikolai’s voice rings through the dark space despite him not opening his mouth.

The boy startles, wide piercing blue eyes snapping towards where Nikolai stands at the very edge of the pool. He looks sad, but in the terrified way in which a wild animal trembles when cornered against a dead end.

“What’s your name?” his own voice ripples across the plane again.

The boy does not speak, and it’s then that Nikolai sees his hands, cut up and bloodied grasping onto twin blades of rushing water. It reminds him of his papa, but the boy does not share his father’s reassuring smile.

“Why are you so sad?” he finally gets to say with his own throat.

The older boy’s lips tremble, and he falls to his knees, the black water soaking into his ripped pants. He curls into himself, pulling his knees towards his chest and weeping a broken noise of sorrow. 

“Don’t cry!” Nikolai says, running into the pool towards the boy.

When he reaches the teenager, Nikolai reaches out with his little hands to place a comforting touch on his shoulder, but as soon as he nears, he feels something tighten in his torso. 

He looks down, and the boy’s Hydro blade is lodged in his chest. It feels full, uncomfortable but not piercing, like the way you’ve told him Liyuens describe sleep paralysis as a spectre sitting atop your chest. 

The strange boy starts to cry, his shoulders shaking as sobs send tremors through his chest. Nikolai feels strange, unreal, and he shuts his eyes to will it away. 

“Niko,” a familiar voice calls out. 

He turns, the scene prior completely gone from his periphery.

“Papa!” he says, tears brimming in his eyes as he runs and leaps into his father’s arms, relishing in the warmth of his fingers on his back.

“Hey buddy,” his father says into his hair, and something in his voice breaks, “I missed you.”

He lifts off his papa’s shoulder, sniffling, “I miss you too papa.”

Papa smiles, that comforting, reassuring smile that makes Nikolai feel something akin to adoration. He rubs Nikolai’s hair, brushes away his tears and kisses his cheek.

“You’re back, papa,” he says, nuzzling into his chest.

He is met with silence.

“Papa?” 

He lifts his head up once again, finding nothing, just an empty darkness that stares back at him. He feels like something is moving, slithering under his feet, and he opens his mouth to scream when no sound comes out.

Nikolai wakes with a start, the night air kissing his skin. He cries, discomfort spreading through his chest when he turns to see Milena sleeping soundly next to him. He climbs down from the bed, hiccuping as he makes his way to your room.

He knocks, then he pushes your door in and holds his breath because he is still unsure whether he’s trapped in the dream or not.

“Niko, baby, what’s wrong?” your groggy voice calls through the dark. 

He wails, “mama!”

“Oh baby,” you reach over to turn on your lamp, “come here my love.”

He lets you pull him up, placing him against your chest and holding him tight. 

“Oh my little boy,” you coo, “did you have a bad dream?”

He nods, and the tears gush out yet again.

You kiss his hair, rocking him gently back and forth.

“Do you want to talk about what happened?” you say.

He shakes his head, burying his nose into your shoulder.

“Do you want me to tell you a story?” 

“When’s papa coming back?” he interjects sadly.

Your arms seem to snake ever-tighter across his back, placing another gentle kiss on his head. 

“Three days,” you say, “do you miss him?”

He knows his papa is coming back to him, always, because of the very simple fact that he is his papa. It’s just that Nikolai’s little heart hurts because he would like to have a kiss from his papa, he’d like to cuddle his papa in the morning, it’s a missing that will still be there even if his father was right in front of him.

He nods.

“Oh, Niko,” you soothe, “papa will be back just like always, you don’t need to worry.”

“Okay,” he agrees, shutting his tired eyes. “Can you sing a song, mama?”

“Of course baby,” you whisper.

He sighs, melting into the comfort of his mother’s hold as he listens to the rumble of your chest. 

“Hush little baby, don’t say a word, mama’s gonna buy you a mockingbird…”

Nikolai’s heartbeat slows, lulled to sleep gently by the sound of your voice. He thinks back on the dream, the face of the freckled boy and the poor hands that held tightly to the twin swords. He doesn’t dream again, only hears the warmth of your singing.

“...well, you’ll still be the sweetest little baby in town.”

You are roused out of sleep by the call of finches at your windowsill and the feeling of your hair being brushed upwards onto the perch of your ear.

“Morning, lovely,” Ajax says when you open your eyes.

You feel your breath catch at the sight of him where he lays parallel to you, hand outstretched towards your face with a smile so bright you almost mistake him for stars. He got back just as the twins fell asleep, and you greeted him with a hungry kiss at the door that led you upstairs.

Locus amoenus, that is where your mind goes as you bear witness to the divine sight of Ajax,  the man with fiery hair whose powers rival the might of entire armies, lying beside you on a simple morning. ‘Pleasant place’, the phrase used to describe paradises, topos in mythology where the space is so idyllic that your breath is suspended in awe at the sight of it.

The plump birds outside go on chirping, the dust in your bedroom illuminated by the stream of sunlight through the billowing curtains, and you are here, head against your pillow with the thought that you want to kiss what might be a god. So strong, and so notorious for it, and yet he is here, scarred and toned torso bare under your soft blanket as he strokes your hair, eyes pools of the richest blue that soften when he looks at you. 

You can almost taste the sun in your mouth.

You start to ask about the twins, but he interrupts you as if one look at you and he could read your very thoughts.

“They’re still sleeping,” he grins, “I checked.”

You nuzzle into the hand that now cups your cheek, kissing the skin of his palm. Wordlessly he reaches out with his other arm, pulling you into him, and you breathe in his scent as your face is pressed to the firm pad of his chest. You stay like this for a minute, content to bask in the glow of his presence.

Your eyes shoot open when you realize that you have yet to check on the wards, and you quickly flip over and reach for the necklace on your nightstand. Ajax groans into the crook of your neck, his arms still wrapped tightly around your waist as you examine the swirling beads of dendro that all remain intact.

He kisses the skin of your shoulder blade, “you don’t need to check all the time, you know.”

You set the thing down, scooting back so you are nestled comfortably in the shape of him. 

He kisses the pulse of your neck, “I’m here,” again, “you’re here.”

“It’s not harming anyone to check,” you reply, craning your head to look back at him.

He leans forward, kisses your cheek, “it makes you a worrywart.”

You huff a laugh, shivering when he takes your chin gently in his fingers to tilt your head back and place a tender kiss on your mouth. 

“I love you.”

And your breath catches again. His soft confession, the warmth of his skin, the morning sunlight that illuminates the dust that almost looks suspended in the air of your bedroom. 

“I saw the cutest dress in the window of a shop yesterday on the way home, it would’ve been perfect for our little princess” he says, nibbling your ear.

You narrow your eyes, sheets rustling as you flip back around, “and you bought it?”

He presses his thumb to your bottom lip, “you would’ve told me off again and said that she’d grow out of it in no time.”

“No I wouldn’t,” your brows furrow and he leans in to kiss the wrinkles.

Ajax chuckles, “then you’ll be happy to know I’ve already ordered it—picking it up tomorrow.”

You roll your eyes but there is no annoyance as he leans in again to kiss you—only to be interrupted by the sound of knocking on your door. You shoot Ajax a look of disbelief; he had taught the twins the knocking pattern.

“Good morning!” Nikolai exclaims, hanging off the doorknob as the door swings inwards. 

“Hey, no shouting please,” you scold as your twins file in, Hugo herding behind them. 

Your warning falls upon deaf ears because the sight of their returned father next to you elicits the twins’ shrill screams. They more or less leap onto your bed and pile on top of him, asking after him and how his trip was and whether they could have their morning kisses.

“I wanna go to the beach,” Milena says excitedly.

“That’s a great idea, Milly,” Ajax replies, turning to you. “Right baby?”

You feel your heart skip, “o-only after we do some èrhú practice, okay?”

The twins nod, simultaneously resting their cheeks on their father’s chest.

“But,” Ajax interjects, “we’re going to need breakfast first.”

“I need to brush my teeth!” Nikolai says.

“Me too, me too!” Milena adds.

You and Ajax laugh as the twins rush out the door, Hugo huffing before he once again follows the overexcited balls of energy. Ajax makes a comment about how the dog needs a raise and you grin.

He gets up yawning, hands still attached to you, and lets out a contented sigh. Your breath catches again when he leans back down to kiss your shoulder tenderly. 

“You’re beautiful,” he breathes.

His lips move down to your waist, your hip, then the sensitive nerves at the back of your knee. He lifts your leg up gingerly, perches your heel on his shoulder before he turns and kisses your ankle. You shiver.

You are almost embarrassed , like a teenager’s first blossoming love, like the nerves of a first meeting, clumsy hands and awkward lips. You are laid bare by his tender gaze, even more so than your skin is bare under the blanket. 

“Bring me some clothes,” you say, turning away. 

“Nothing I haven’t seen before,” he shrugs, and you roll your eyes.

You hear shuffling as he puts on his pants, and you are about to breathe out a sigh of relief thinking he is leaving when you feel a hand around your wrist, then Ajax’s face is in view, and you can’t help the smile when he kisses you softly.

He grins, “I love you.”

You watch him go after he fishes your nightdress from the floor, the sight of his strong shoulders littered with lovebites and the way the muscles of his slender waist shifts as he opens the door leaving your mind reeling. You bury your face into your blanket to erase your impure thoughts.

You glance at the swirling necklace on your nightstand, contemplating for a moment before you decide to pocket it instead of hooking it around your neck as you follow your family down the stairs. Baby steps.

Locus amoenus. 

Ajax has always thought that the moon was created for you. That the silver beams cast upon the grounds of Teyvat were all meant to land on the plane of your face, to illuminate your deft fingers as you press upon the strings of the èrhú he had gifted you.

And now he thinks that perhaps the entire universe was created for you, you and his twins; his and yours. As he watches the three pieces of his very soul in the garden behind the little cottage, he cannot help but think that the smile on your face, on his twins’ faces, that the sight may be something entirely unearthly. 

Maybe you really were a faerie, and when he had confessed his real name to you in the kitchen of your old apartment in the heart of Liyue Harbour years ago, and when you set his heart ablaze by repeating it back to him softly, you’d magicked him into a plane of existence in which all he would taste on his tongue is your name; you, you, you. 

He almost feels a lump in his throat watching your loving gaze upon them. You command the èrhú with expert ease, fingers moving like second-nature as you play a Fontainian nursery rhyme for Nikolai and Milena to dance to. They spin and they squeal, hand in hand, singing along with the song as Hugo circles around them, attempting to herd the unruly twins.

And he can’t help it, he gravitates to you, sitting on the grass and slotting his legs around you, perching his chin on the crook of your neck and humming along. Ajax loves you, he knows this. He feels it pushing against his rib cage as he breathes, in the stretch of his clavicle when he moves.

And he feels it again when you are in the city the next day, watching the twins flank you as you lean over a fruit stand, feeling the softness of a punnet of plums before you add them to the growing pile of groceries. 

It probably sounds ridiculous: the Eleventh of the Fatui Harbingers, one of Snezhnaya’s most deadly weapons, the Tsaritsa’s Vanguard, stands behind a pushchair for his two children, entranced by the mere mundane way his lover picks up plums.

He wouldn’t have it any other way.

The twins hop into their stroller when they are tired, and before long they’ve both dozed off under the canopy of its hood; it must be time for their afternoon nap. And so Ajax tugs on your wrist, looking at you with a mischievous gaze as he stops in the middle of the cobbled street. 

“Let’s go for a drink,” he says.

You hum in acquiescence and he grins, pushing the stroller towards Quartier Narbonnais. The Fontainian establishments, much like ones in Snezhnaya, Inazuma and Mondstadt, usually decorate differently depending on the seasons. With these summer months, they’ve brought out tables for patrons to dine outside in the kind sun.

Ajax greets the Hotel Debord waitress jovially, and she leads him to a quiet table next to the hotel fountain and he parks the stroller of his sleeping twins, running behind a chair and pulling it out for you. 

“Milady,” he says as he sketches a dramatic bow.

He watches you fight a grin as you sit, and he can’t help but lean down and plant a chaste kiss on your lips; just because.

“A spritz please,” you say before he even has to ask.

Ajax smirks knowingly, “you’re not going to get all weepy for me after a drink, are you?”

He delights in the way you avert your eyes, recalling a time in Liyue when you were buzzed from a few drinks with your friends which led to you dragging him back to your home and confessing to him that you wanted to kiss him. He smiles at the memory and orders your drink, a beer for himself and some garlic baguette and a pot of Poisson seafood soup to share.

You slip into easy conversation with him, and he holds your hand atop the marble table as you discuss the different elementary schools Olga had recommended for the twins. You’ve narrowed it down between École Élémentaire de Lucine and l’Academie Mermonia based on teaching quality and extracurriculars, plus how your schedule would allow you to pick them up once you start working. 

“You don’t have to work, you know.”

“Then I’d be doing nothing,” you reply.

Ajax squeezes your hand, “are you kidding? You’re already doing so much work, the cottage, the twins, Hugo, that’s work too.”

You shake your head with a smile, and he can’t help but lean over to steal a kiss from your soft lips over the table. He insists that you should pick out the school by tonight since he is leaving tomorrow and you hum in agreement. He likes this, deciding mundane things together. 

It is almost enough for him to forget all else that he is.

“Hey,” he says suddenly. 

You stop, eyes looking up to him from the spoon in your mouth. 

He smiles, “I love you.”

He likes this too, saying those words. It makes him feel alive.

You pull the spoon out, swallowing the hearty broth of the soup that was just served to the table. You fix him with a look that he knows can’t be anything other than that same fiery love and his heart is ablaze. 

“Let’s make vareniki tonight,” you say, squeezing his hand.

He chuckles brightly, “yeah.”

Milena hears water and chatter. 

That’s strange, because there’s no body of water up in the Marcotte mountains. Mama and papa are usually downstairs when she and her twin are napping, but it is distinctly your voice that she hears, then papa’s answering one. 

She shifts slightly, and she remembers that she was in the Court of Fontaine for a day out. That’s right! She must still be in her seat in the stroller, still in the city, and her parents must be having a chat near a fountain. Once she has sufficiently used the scientific method (she learned that term from a picture book about chemistry) to deduce her surroundings, she slowly opens her eyes.

Milena has often thought that you are the prettiest woman she’s ever seen. 

She watches you smile (though she doesn’t think you even know you’re smiling, that’s the effect papa has on you), and her heart is giddy when she sees the way you look at her papa, and the way he looks at you. Her vision is slightly obscured by the hood of the pushchair but she can so clearly see the tilt of your head and the contented stretch of your cheeks. She sees her papa’s boyish grin and the way his eyes look like they are bewitched by you.

Milena yawns—wait! She wants to keep watching mama and papa!

“Oh, hey princess,” her papa says, and Milena blinks away the tears of her yawn. 

She reaches her arms out towards him and he tilts his head with the most handsome smile she’s ever seen on a human being and pushes back the hood of her seat, picking her up with a ‘come to your daddy’, careful not to wake a still sleeping Nikolai. Milena stretches as she is placed on her papa’s comfy lap, smacking her lips to stretch out the remnants of sleep.

You ask her if she wants some water and she nods, settling her back into papa’s chest and peering up at him. She finds that he is already watching her, gently brushing her hair with his lithe fingers. 

“What did you dream about, my snowflake?”

Her heart is very warm in her chest when you hand her a glass of water, and she takes a few sips before she hands it back to you. 

“There was a unicorn,” she says, “I went on his back and he took me to see flowers.”

She watches a smile break across your face as you break up a slice of bread and hand it to her, she takes it and bites into the garlicky crust with a contented hum. 

She does so love it when you smile.

“In that case, you'll be happy to know there's a new exhibit at the gallery,” you say, “La Chasse à la Licorne, it’ll be on for a few months baby.”

“Really?” Milena starts kicking her feet excitedly, “can I see a real unicorn?”

Papa lets out a long whistle above her, “only the bravest and most pure-hearted can see a unicorn, you sure you’re up for it?”

“Of course!” she says through a mouthful of bread which inspires a chuckle from her father.

She likes this. She likes it a lot.

The day finishes with the four of you piling into a photobooth around the corner of the Opera Epiclese, Nikolai on papa’s lap and Milena on yours, the twins making silly faces and you and papa laughing, locking eyes with smiles plastered on both of your faces as the last flash and click of the shutter goes off. 

Chapter Text

There would be moments, times where you feel control slipping slowly away from you. Like when you wake up and the twins have somehow found their way into the already snug space of your bed, sleeping in the small gap between you and their father. Ajax’s arm is long enough so that he’s wrapped them both up cozily, and you feel something in your heart tug at the sight. The trio are asleep and the picture of perfection, but that picture means to you what you so ardently do not want it to mean; something that may not last. 

Cuckoo calls in the early morning, laughter at the kitchen table when you pad down the stairs, sleepy smiles in pyjamas over breakfast. Walks with Hugo in the woods, all five of you together, coming home and shuffling around the kitchen cooking dinner. You do not know when that became routine, but the struggle to imagine life without him brings you unease. 

Borrowed grief for your love on borrowed time.

Yet you love him still. 

He stands in the small space of the kitchen the morning of the day he is set to leave again, flipping fragrant fluffy syrniki on the stove. Nikolai is dozing off on his shoulder, drooling onto his pyjama shirt. Ajax holds him easily, like the boy was made to fit into the shoulder blade of his father. Milena sits on the counter next to the stove, little legs dangling absentmindedly as she watches the fritters cook.

You survey the mess on the dining table, flour and bits of tvorog on the surface.

Milena notices you from her perch and calls for you, startling Nikolai out of his sleep and drawing Ajax’s attention to you standing idly in the small doorway.

You smile, “good morning, my Milly.” 

“Mama!”

Ajax smiles, too, and he hands your son over. 

“What are you guys up to?” you ask, leaning down with Nikolai on your hip to kiss Milena on the top of her head.

“You want to tell your matusya what I taught you to make?” Ajax says, flipping the last pancake.

Your heart flutters.

“Syrniki! ” they say in unison.

“Papa said they’re pancakes but even better,” Milena supplies.

“And who’s going to help me with cleaning up that table over there?” you say, and you don’t miss the way Ajax grins at you. 

The twins excitedly shout their offers of assistance and you help them down to the floor, telling them to get plates and bowls ready as you get a washcloth and wipe the table down. Ajax sneaks a kiss onto the corner of your mouth and you shake your head when he just smiles.

The smell of the cooking syrniki permeates the morning, the sizzling butter and the fragrant scent of the tvorog . Your stomach is practically begging you for the delights as you sit everyone down. 

You breakfast with your twins and their father, passing around bowls of berry compote and soured cream, exchanging laughter over mouthfuls of pancakes and sips of the bulle fruit juice Ajax had made last night. 

And here you are again, holding your breath as you watch for the unbridled adoration stuck in your children’s teeth when they beam at him from across the table.

“I’ll take Hugo out really quickly,” Ajax says as he gets up from his seat, placing a kiss on each of the twins’ heads before giving your shoulder a light squeeze.

He leaves promptly after putting his plate in the sink, the white beast looking like he is in desperate need of the toilet, donning a coat before he heads out into the light rainfall.

You continue breakfast with the twins, watching them scarf down their food.

“Nikolai, chew slowly,” you scold.

“But I haf’ t’ go!” he says through a mouthful of compote and syrniki .

“Where do you have to go? Eat your food slowly baby,” you reply.

“To th’ g’rden wi’ papa ‘n Hugo,” Milena answers, mouth equally as full.

The pair get up hastily, hopping off their chairs towards the front door.

You grimace, “you haven’t finished your food.”

“Papa is gonna show us more flankirovka! ” Nikolai reasons after he swallows, “please mama.”

You had thought that Ajax would keep leaving, and Nikolai and Milena would learn to be heartbroken, and you would have no means of being able to put the pieces back together in any way significant enough to allow them a normal childhood. And yet, they are so full of love, your twins. His and yours.

They understand his having to go, and though they miss him, they are still able to thrive without him being there. They are excited when he sends letters, and of course they are excited when he is home, but they are faring well.

“No,” you sigh, “at least clean up your plates first.”

They race to grab their dishes and practically trip over themselves into the kitchen to put them away. Your calls of caution fall upon deaf ears as they then race to grab their raincoats, slipping into their gumboots and sprinting outside at the highest speed their little legs will allow. 

They are incandescent like this. They love him and he loves them and they will wait for him and he will keep returning to them. He is their papa, and they are his babies. 

It works. You hope it is working.

You fiddle with the locket around your neck that now houses another photograph, one of you four together, and then sigh at the empty placemats that surround you on the breakfast table.

Ajax spent a long time away this time around. 

His twins are starting school in a few weeks, and Nikolai is finally enrolled in dance lessons whilst Milena is going to join the scouts. They turn six in a month, and he already knows exactly how he is going to decorate the cottage for their birthday. He can imagine it even now, how you’ll be busy in the kitchen baking medovik , how he’ll get a taste of the batter from your finger and then kiss your sweet lips as he shuffles around to find scissors to trim wrapping paper. You’d scold him for buying so many presents and he’ll know you don’t mean it, and then you’ll sit with him and Hugo as he blows balloons up, the nutty scent of the baking cake filling the entire house slowly.

When Ajax wakes up from the dream, he stretches lazily, reaching over to find you on your side of the bed—except he cannot find you. His eyes shoot open and you are nowhere in the bedroom, the bedsheets long gone cold. 

For a moment he imagines the worst, though he isn’t even sure what that would be. He let himself sleep soundly enough to dream for the first time in a long time, and you are gone. He stumbles out of bed and the house is silent and his heart beats against the confines of his chest as he runs out through the front door.

He breathes out a sigh of relief when he sees Milena on the porch bench, legs folded in front of her and quietly reading her book. Ajax smiles, bounding up to her with a beaming smile. 

“Hey Milly,” he says, “whatcha up to?”

He reaches down to where Hugo is sitting at his daughter’s feet and pets the creature on his head. The white dog leans in, nuzzling his wet nose into his palm.

“Reading,” she replies pointedly. “You didn’t shower papa.”

Ajax looks down at his pyjamas, “I suppose I haven’t.”

She hums in acknowledgement, “mama says maggots eat you if you don’t shower.”

“Well, mama’s right, but I’m strong so I can fight them off,” he sits down next to her, tilting his head to watch her concentrated face. 

She meets his eyes then, his mirror. 

“Mama says they grow in your skin.”

Almighty Tsaritsa, such horror and he hasn’t even had his breakfast!

Ajax reaches up to ruffle Milena’s hair, and asks where the rest of the household has disappeared to.

“At the garden,” she replies, looking at him expectantly.

“Oh, my apologies my princess,” he says grandiosely, leaning in to kiss her soft cheek, “your morning kiss.”

His daughter giggles, patting his face before she goes back to her book.

Ajax smiles contentedly.

He finds you crouched opposite Nikolai in the patch of vegetables in the little garden, a soft smile on your face as you watch your son rifle through the ground for what Ajax assumes is definitely not worms because he knows the boy can’t stand those little things. 

“Whatcha doing?” he calls out.

You look up and he is winded, disarmed by your gentle smile. Your hair is pulled back by the familiar patchwork scarf fashioned into a headscarf, and the gentle colours against your hair are as vibrant as the way his heart beats now.

“Beetroots,” you say as he approaches.

“We’re gonna make borscht! ” Nikolai adds. 

You are still glancing up at him, head tilted, and he can’t help but reach down to cup your face, stroking your cheek with a whispered ‘good morning’. You lean into his touch, and the way your beam brightens almost makes him fall to his knees. He bends down, places a tender kiss to your lips.

“Eww,” Nikolai says, “gross.”

“Get used to it, buddy,” Ajax grunts, stretching out his sore back.

Nikolai sticks out his tongue at his father and he laughs.

“You okay?” you ask, concerned for his knitted brow.

“Yeah,” he says, “there was a faerie that kept me up all night.”

You scowl, hitting him on the shin with the back of your hand.

“Ow!” he says dramatically. “Hey, you remind me of her actually, she’s insatiable—”

You hit him again, gesturing to Nikolai who is still busy pulling the deep burgundy bulbs from the ground, his smile growing wider with every pluck that breaks the surface of the dirtbed.

“I was almost killed by a faerie who wouldn’t let me go to sleep because she was so damned vicious and this is the way you show concern for your dear—”

He shuts up quickly when he sees the unamused look you wear and he quickly pivots the question into a different direction.

“Are you making the borscht, little prince?”

Nikolai puts his hands up in the air excitedly, “yeah!”

Ajax hears Hugo running up from behind him suddenly, growling.

He is off his feet no later than a split-second when the familiar whizzing of an arrow flies past him. He hears the white dog barking as he runs towards the thicket of trees, Ajax’s honed instincts already zeroed in on the intruder. Another one comes and it misses him entirely, and he is upon the assassin before they could even think of nocking another arrow. 

“Who sent you?” he spits, hand around the man’s throat.

“W-wait—he said I was just supposed to scare you! I didn’t—”

“ Who. Sent. You.”

The assassin whimpers with the tightening of Ajax’s grip, eyes wide with terror.

“The—at the—the Pankration Ring,” he chokes out.

“How many?”

“Wha—” his nails dig into skin, “three! It was three of them!”

Ajax’s eyes darken before he summons a blade and drives it through the man’s heart. 

He stares at the limp body below him, moving it easily to rest behind a tree out of the way lest the twins stumble upon it. Though, you’ve probably already taken them inside. He will need to call for someone to deal with this.

“MAMA!”

Ajax breaks into a sprint back to the house. And then, his world stops. 

“Niko, Niko, baby, hey,” it’s you, your voice. 

“Mama! Mama I’m scared,” Milena, crying. 

Hugo is barking.

Nikolai. An arrow in his arm. 

An arrow in his son’s arm.

“Ajax!” your voice startles him, shrill and desperate and spurring him into action. 

He drops down to his knees in the dirt, “let me take him.”

“He was just—where did you—”

“Now.”

“Papa, what’s happening?” Milena shakes his shoulder and Ajax can only put a hand behind her shoulder to soothe her.

You hand him over, “please Ajax, please.”

Ajax does not say anything as he wraps his arms around his son, his pallid and whimpering son. Oh gods. 

“Hospital in the city,” he says.

He looks over Milena who is now safe in your grasp, and then he turns into water and moves faster than the wind.

Chapter Text

“Mama, I’m scared.”

“I know, baby, I’m right here.”

When Milena was two, she developed an aversion to thunder; more so than the average child. She would scream and wail from the moment she saw lightning and then she would cry until the sounds following stopped. In the summer, when storms were most frequent, there would be nights where she would go sleepless, which meant you would also go sleepless. You tried everything, ear muffs, ear plugs, soundproofing the windows, thick curtains to keep out the light—even ‘Hydro Dragon, Hydro Dragon, don’t cry” didn’t help soothe her. At least Nikolai stayed asleep most times she woke up in fear.

You were frustrated out of your mind that you couldn’t comfort her. See, the crying of a child that is not your own, that is far removed from you, doesn’t often inspire sympathy. The distant crying of a neighbourhood toddler, a child strapped to their father’s back crying as he walked through the market down by the harbour, your neighbour’s newborn whose hiccups could be heard through your walls. These mundanities were sometimes even a nuisance, until Milena and Nikolai. 

Since the moment they were born, you have felt their suffering as if it was your very own. Every bump and every scratch as if the bruises would show up on your skin too, as if their fevers and coughs afflict you equally as much, as if…

As if that arrow had pierced you. 

Your arms tighten around Milena. 

It’s been half an hour and you have just gotten on the Aquabus at Marcotte Station. Milena sits on your lap, exhausted by tears but not enough so to fall asleep. You think people are staring, but you are not even sure if there are people around you. You cannot afford to let your guard down right now but it takes everything in you not to collapse. 

“Where did they go?”

“To the hospital, Milly.”

You feel as if you are watching everything from the outside, looking into a pond to see the murky scene of a child on her mother’s lap, the rumbling of the waterway under them.

“Is Niko going to die?”

Your head snaps to her, “don’t say that.”

“Why?”

“Stop it, Milena.”

That’s not it. That’s not what you meant to say. Milena breaks into tears once again and buries her face in your chest. 

All you can do is hold her.

There’s so much blood. 

A five year old boy should not be able to bleed this much. How much blood does a child have in their little body?

Ajax crashes into the emergency room of the Court of Fontaine General Hospital, shouting what he imagines are mostly incoherent demands. The nurses stare at him, then they look down at the boy in his arms and spur into action.

One reaches for Nikolai, and Ajax flinches away on instinct. 

“Please, sir, we need to take him,” he says.

His chest heaves, but he complies. He puts a bloody hand in his hair when the nurse takes his son away, trying and failing to find his breath. 

“Sir, you cannot go inside. Are you the child’s father?”

“Yes.”

“What is his name?”

“Niko—Nikolai.”

“And his age?”

“He’s five.”

“Blood type?”

Ajax could recite this information in his sleep. It’s his baby.

“Sir, could you tell me what happened?” 

“An arrow—from the forest.”

“A stray arrow?”

No. An arrow that would be nowhere near his baby had he not been there too. An assassin that you would have detected had he been absent and you had worn the necklace. 

He needs to see his baby.

“Sir, you cannot enter the surgery room, please wait here.”

“My son is—”

“In very capable hands. You cannot do anything in there, please understand.”

Oh gods.

“Sir, is Nikolai’s mother aware of this?”

He nods.

“Where is she?”

“She’s with our daughter.”

“Are they safe?”

Are you? All this time he had feared what would happen when he was away, he never imagined something would happen in front of his very eyes. 

There was so much blood.

“Sir, I will assign an officer to your case, please stay here.”

Ajax thinks of a candle, the rib bones of a beast, and the snarling of rifthounds. 

You had packed a change of clothes for everyone. You do not let Milena look at Ajax until he’s changed and washed off the blood. You could barely look yourself. 

Your son’s blood.

It takes an hour, you think, two? You have no knowledge of time in the pristine white marbled waiting room, Ajax walking up and down the hallway right outside to try and lull Milena to sleep. You merely just sit, bouncing your knee, hands clasped in front of you.

“He’s a healthy boy,” the doctor says when she walks in, “he’ll need lots of rest, but he’s not at risk anymore.”

You thank her through unshed tears, Milena sound asleep on Ajax’s shoulder as he rubs your back in an attempt to soothe you. You lean into his touch, and he brings you in, kissing the top of your head in his own daze.

You try to let the knowledge that he is okay sink in, but you have yet to get over the mere thought of him being in any danger in the first place. You can barely stomach the sight of him when they wheel him out into the ward, pale and sleeping in a little hospital gown. Your precious baby boy.

You stand silently beside Ajax now, watching Milena snuggled in the hospital bed, their little fingers entwined atop his chest as the pair sleep. It’s been a long day.

Ajax takes your hand and you do not have the energy to refuse.

“It’s my fault.” 

You inhale sharply, “stop, Ajax.”

“You’re going to tell me to leave.”

You do not reply.

“You’re going to tell me that it was my fault that our baby got hurt and that you knew it would turn out like this,” he continues and you open your mouth before he cuts you off. “You’re going to tell me that you can’t stand the thought of things being like this for the rest of their lives.”

You look at him, his messy copper hair and newly-changed clothes. 

“You didn’t check the wards because of me, and Nikolai got hurt,” Ajax says. 

He holds your gaze, teeth worrying at his bottom lip.

“I’ll go.”

“What?”

He squeezes your hand, “I love our twins, and I love you.”

You think of Nikolai’s belly-laugh, Milena’s crinkled nose. Giggles before bedtime and chatter at bathtime, groggy mornings with Ajax’s piling of mlyntsi onto their plates, laughter on brambly hikes and laughter even when someone takes a tumble. You think of the twins’ fights over who gets to piggy-back papa upstairs and who gets to help papa shave, the way they collect his drawings and the way they jump on the bed to wake him up. 

You think of the way they ask after him when he is away, yet do not seem saddened having to wait for him, so long as they know when he will come back. They trust him to; he’s their papa. 

You think of how you trust him with them, too. Despite everything, you trust him the most. 

You still do.

He squeezes your hand with a forlorn smile.

Ajax and his bashful smile, the freckles littering his skin and the sharp point of his teeth, the way he takes a second to pause and process what you say before he breaks out into a grin that rivals the might of the sun. Ajax and the warsong in his blood, the simultaneous lust for battle and life that thrums in the stark cornflower blue of his eyes, the way he makes you feel exhilarated with just a look. 

When you first held the twins, bloody and pale, all tiny and wailing—you had cried. Cried because of the exhaustion, the hormones; because you missed him. Watching him with them has never brought you a second of doubt.

He is their father.

“I’ll go,” he says.

You stiffen.

“I will deal with the people who did this. I’ll take you home, and then I will go.”

What a strange notion ‘home’ is. Folklore homecoming is often a story of mutability, like Oisín’s leaving Tír na nÓg to find that three-hundred years had passed in the human realm of his home. Urashima Tarō leaves Ryūgū-jō to find that the same three-hundred years had passed since he left his village. They leave home for their love, and then nothing is ever the same.

“I’ll set up a way to send money discreetly, so don’t worry about anything, lovely.”

He presses a kiss to your temple, turns around.

Ajax is going to leave, and your twins will learn their first heartbreak. You thought you would have been more prepared, that at least fighting it would give you the illusion that you are doing enough. Leaving, that is what he does, though you foolishly thought things had changed.

You’ll need time to figure out how you will tell them that their beloved papa is not going to come back. Maybe a part of you wishes that he will decide for himself not to go. 

You are a fool.

He leaves, that has always been the story. There has never been any other version of this story. Ignis Fatuus.

You look at the space he was just standing in, and then your eyes drift to your sleeping Milena and Nikolai.

Ajax deals with it quickly. 

Pankration Ring regulars who were butthurt about him beating their asses despite being a newcomer, hiring a mercenary to do their bidding. It was supposed to be a ‘scare’, they’d said before he crushed their throats one by one. 

It was not thrilling, there was no fight. He simply did it as he would a chore. 

His Fatui attendant that was assigned to escort you and the twins sends him word that you are back soundly at the cottage, that Nikolai was asking after him. His heart squeezes.

Ajax thinks he should say goodbye, and so he takes the familiar rocky path up to the cottage. You are already waiting, in the threshold of the front door, looking at him with something indiscernible swirling in your honey-gaze.

You walk in, letting him follow, and he closes the door gently.

“No,” your stern voice startles him.

“What?”

He lets go of the doorknob, watching the way your chest moves when you take in a steadying breath. You are so utterly beautiful, he thinks. He hopes that when his twins grow up, they will look exactly like you, that the way he loves you so dearly will show clear as day on their wonderful faces for all to see. 

“No,” you swallow before you step closer, “you don’t get to go.”

Ajax locks his jaw. 

“You begged to meet them, Ajax,” you say, “you wanted to, even though I didn’t.”

And his son almost died for it, for his twisted, selfish desire to be a father.

“You sent a Fatuus to monitor us. Nikolai was distraught when you weren’t there when he woke up—Milena too.”

Something in him hurts.

“I couldn’t even protect you from some petty goons,” he laughs, “Nikolai almost died because of some childish vendetta against me.”

The truth is that we must prepare for war, Tartaglia.

A storm is brewing, Tartaglia.

The Captain’s task in Fontaine is in motion, the Tsaritsa’s icy war is cresting Teyvat. 

When the day of reckoning arrives, he will either live or die in frost, eyes up at the snowy sky of his home. Or perhaps, he will be back in the ocean, the whale-way’s embrace. He will be in the belly of the beast and the sound of tearing muscle and clanging metal will be to him the song that he has always been called to, called by. Tartaglia, the Tsaritsa’s weapon, the Vanguard of the Fatui Harbingers. 

He cannot ensure your safety if you are tied to him. It’s different when it’s his family in Morepesok, but you will not come with him to Snezhnaya and he cannot cage you, nor can he do so to his twins. It’s for the best that he leaves.

“And then what?”

“What?”

“You leave, then what?” you sigh, glancing up at him expectantly.

“I—”

“No, Ajax, you have immortalized yourself into their childhood, it’s either you admit that you are going to break their hearts and leave me to pick up the pieces, or you stay.”

Ajax thinks about the first time he laid eyes on them. He remembers Nikolai’s little voice calling for you, I’m cold , he’d said. He remembers his eyes following the joining of their hands and seeing Milena right there next to him. His twins, his mirrors. He remembers the way his heart squeezed, the way it still does, when he sees them in your arms. His lover, his babies.

“It’s not that simple,” he says quietly. “I can’t live with the thought that you three could be used against me. You don’t deserve this.”

You don’t deserve a war-thing like him.

“They are your children, Ajax—our babies,” you scoff.

He is breathless when you step towards him again, taking his hands. 

His hands, the instruments of war, the very thing that shreds and kills; he has never been sorry for the blood until now. You hold them like you are holding his heart in your palms.

“Come back to me,” you whisper.

“I’m sorry,” he breathes, “not like this.”

You stare at him and he sees you take your cheek between your molars. 

He reminds himself that he is a sword, that he is the Tsaritsa’s finest weapon, that there is not supposed to be a life like this for someone like him. 

“Mama? Papa?” 

And yet there is.

You turn around, and Ajax’s heart climbs into his throat because it’s them, there again, just like the first night he saw them. And… it’s you, again, who goes to them. 

“Why are you two awake, hm?” you say gently, taking each of their cheeks in your palms. “Niko, baby, you still have to be in bed.”

Ajax watches his twins look between you and him.

“I heard papa,” Nikolai says sleepily.

He looks at the bandage around his son’s arm and he remembers the blood. He remembers the coppery smell and the way it seeped into his clothes, how warm the liquid was, the stickiness of it. His son’s blood on his hands, his arms, dried in his hair and on his face. 

He has never felt blood like that.

“Ajax.”

He blinks.

“They want you to take them to bed,” you say, and he does not miss the way your voice wavers.

He musters up a smile before he moves, picking his twins up easily like they are just another part of him. He kisses Nikolai’s cheek, then Milena’s, committing their soft toddler skin to memory. He climbs the familiar creaky stairs and brings them to their bed, tucking them in with his horrible hands. 

He kisses their foreheads, smiles onto their skin and tells them a kazka .

“Sirko is like Hugo, papa,” his daughter chuckles when he finishes, nuzzling her cheek into her pillow.

“What is firewater?” his son yawns. 

“Water puts out fire,” Milena adds.

“Firewater is an adult drink in Snezhnaya,” he answers, “it’s water that tastes like fire.”

The twins make a simultaneous noise of disgust and Ajax huffs a weighted laugh. 

“Go to bed, alright kiddos?” he says.

They are still so small, there is still time for him to let them grow without him, to keep them from hearing and seeing the call that he will answer.

“Night night papa,” Milena says, holding out her arms.

He leans in, hugging her little frame and kissing her cheek. Oh gods.

“Goodnight lovely girl,” he smiles through the lump in his throat.

They were fine without him before, and they can be again.

“Me too!” Nikolai demands. 

And what else could he do but obey?

“Night night, my little prince.”

“Love you papa,” his twins say in unison.

Ajax’s jaw clenches.

“I love you too,” he swallows, “I love you both so much.”

Your gaze is leveled at the clearing still bright with the summer light when he finds you. The sun will set tonight and it will rise again without him beside you. He takes in the sight of you, his beloved, your chin tucked into the patchwork scarf around your neck.

Hugo groans in his sleep.

“I’m sorry.”

You are silent.

“I will make sure that no one will be able to trace me to you,” he says, “I will—”

“Go,” you say.

The golden necklace that usually sits atop your sternum is tangled in your fingers, and Ajax swallows the desire to bury his face in your lap and repent.

“Wait—”

“No,” you turn to him, “go, if that is what you intend to do. I do not want your words.”

You stand up, approaching him under the porch light. His heart squeezes when he looks upon you, the warm light illuminating the band of your lashes.

“Is this how you want it to end?” he says.

You do not look at him, “you made that choice, Ajax. There is only an end because you willed it.”

You take his hand and he unfurls his fingers without a word, your skin on his like a spell that screams at him to stay. The necklace is dropped into his palm and he closes his fist around the metal warm from having rested on your skin, and he takes a deep breath.

He leans in, and you allow his forehead to press against yours. Your chin moves forward ever so slightly, like you want to kiss him, but the hurt in your eyes tells him that you are fighting it.

“I love you,” he says, breathless, “I’ll love you until the day I draw my last breath, and I will love you still after that.”

You unwrap the scarf around your neck, hooking it around his nape and tying a knot in front of his throat. The bright colours are so at odds with the tempest in him.

“Don’t—” you make a noise of disbelief, “don’t go, Ajax.”

Whatever wretched creature within him that wears human skin hurts at the unsure sound of your voice. The quiet pleading that you have never done before. All he wants is to reach out and hold you, but he cannot bear to do so, not with his horrible, sullied hands that know only destruction. 

He closes his eyes, peeling himself away from your warmth. He will remember the way you look at him now until he is in his watery grave, it will haunt him, and he will carry it.

Ajax leaves, and he does not look back.

Chapter Text

Children are wrapped in red when they are born to ward off faeries, their clothes put on inside out to confuse the fae folk and therefore render them unable to replace the babes with changelings. You remind yourself of such random tidbits of knowledge to distract from Ajax’s absence.

He has been gone for over a week, and going through the motions of a mundane day is the only thing keeping you afloat. You ignore the fatigue that tugs at your heel, looking to your children to keep yourself on your own two feet.

It’s somewhat easy, stress is not good for your babies.

“Mama,” your daughter says sleepily on the eighth night since Ajax’s parting.

“What is it, Milly?” you say, raking a hand through her hair.

“When will papa come back?” she frowns.

“Yeah, I have to show him the new song,” Nikolai mumbles half-asleep.

You grimace.

“He needs to figure something out right now,” you reply, “we’ll give him time, but just know that he loves you both.”

Milena sighs into her pillow, “do you love papa too?”

You laugh, “why do you ask that, baby?”

“I see it,” she yawns.

“Me too,” Nikolai supplies, “and papa loves you a lotta lot.”

Ajax is easy to love. 

You remember being disturbed by his willing kindness six years ago, the way you could not read him and yet he was so damned nice . People feared the Harbinger as he stalked the Liyue streets, but when he was unknown, like when he’d meet you and Zhongli at Jiulue Teahouse all beaming smile and casual clothes, they adored him. It is very, very difficult not to with the way he charms.

Or when he’d wake you up at dawn, littering kisses about your shoulders as he murmured something about congee and youtiao into your skin and subsequently dragged you to his favourite cart that only sells from five-thirty to eight in the morning right around the mouth of the city. In his youthful vigour he injected you with a joy so succulent that you were inclined to think that he had trapped you in a faerie revel. His love has always been so vivacious, so honest and unbridled. 

Even here in this very cottage, tender touches as you cook, massages for your sore feet. He’d let you sleep in by getting the twins ready for the morning quietly and only waking you up once breakfast is set up. He’d bring you your cup of tea, snuggle into the crook of your neck and ask for a story just like he always has; your dear lover.

“I do,” you say easily. “I love him very much.”

The twins smile, their cornflower blue eyes the exact replica of their father’s twinkling in the dim lamplight of their bedroom. You card your fingers through Milena’s hair once more, listening to their idle discussions about their day.

“Are you still sick mama?” Milena asks, yawning.

“No, Milly, I’ve just been tired, but mama’s okay,” you hum, “I promise, now go to bed alright? You’re going to school tomorrow my loves.”

They cheer, so beyond ecstatic for the start of their elementary school journey. You avoid the thought that Ajax is going to miss this milestone. Perhaps every milestone. 

Stress is bad for your babies, you tell yourself again.

“‘Kay,” Milena yawns, “night night mama, love you.”

“Night night my babies, I love you.”

“G’night mama, love you,” Nikolai mumbles as he pulls the blanket up to his chin.

In his lifetime, Ajax has only ever seen his father fishing at two spots. There is the largest lake in Morepesok which is the perfect spot for ice-fishing, and then there is the breezy seaside in which boat after boat rows out to set up their gear in the middle of the ocean. 

Today, he fishes in the pleasant Snezhnayan summer at the lake, the surface thawed but fish abundant still. 

His relationship with his father is strange, and has been strange ever since he emerged from the Abyss. There is a frustration where his father is still unable to comprehend how his son has become what he has become, and there is the bitterness in Ajax that holds onto the way his father looked upon him with such fear in his teenagehood. He thinks of his twins.

These days, they fish in silence, accompanied only by the lapping of water and the reeling of the fishing lines. Ajax still remembers when he would sit breathless as he listened to his father’s story of monsters and heroes, not a single moment of silence in their long day out. 

“Are you ready to talk, son?” 

His mother rouses him from his contemplations, settling down next to him on the stairway of their Morepesok home. Dinner has just wrapped up with the three big fish he caught with his father earlier in the day, and he can faintly hear Tonia and Anthon’s argument from inside the house.

Ajax takes a deep breath, glancing at his beautiful mother. He thinks of you.

And so he tells her everything, from what he did in Liyue and how he lost you, how he found you again entirely by chance almost six years after. He tells her that you kept the twins from him until that one night where Nikolai and Milena had come downstairs to tell you that they were cold, every detail down to the day he came back and met them where they stood curious-eyed at the foot of the couch.

She bites the inside of her cheek.

“Are you upset at me?” he asks tentatively.

She blinks slowly, and that’s usually a sign for him to run.

“Not because you didn’t tell me,” she replies. 

He hums an acknowledgement. It makes sense, despite her son being a herald of havoc with the reputation to show for it, a mother still cannot help but ache. 

He reaches into his back pocket, fishing out the golden locket. She takes it, perching her reading glasses onto the bridge of her nose and opening the delicate thing. 

His mother gasps, fingers over her lips. 

“Yeah,” he chuckles, “I had the same reaction.”

He stares at the two gnomes holding hands in the front yard, a souvenir from Mondstadt. Ajax starts to feel unsettled when his mother is still silent.

“Mama?” he turns to her when he hears a sniffle, “hey, matusya , why are you crying?”

A soft smile blooms on his face, his arm wrapping around her in comfort.

“Come here,” he says, rubbing her back.

She sobs, “they’re so beautiful, Ajax.”

He nods, squeezing her shoulder, “aren’t they?”

“Twins,” she laughs, “that must have been terrifying.”

He tilts his head, resting his temple on her hair and watching her run the pad of her thumb over your beaming face in the photograph.

“You must tell her I am proud of her,” his mother says. 

Ajax grinds his teeth.

“Something bad happened,” he says quietly.

She sniffles, her wrinkled hand coming up to wipe her cheeks. 

“Nikolai…”

His son’s blood on his clothes, his hands, sticking to him, his skin, his hair.

“He was shot because of me,” he says bitterly, “an arrow from an assassin hired by some goons who wanted to settle a score.”

His mother purses her lips, nodding slowly.

“When?” she asks.

He hesitates, “two weeks ago.”

She spins towards him with such ferocity that he is concerned for her next doctor’s visit, her eyes wide with disbelief. 

“And why are you here?” she demands crossly.

He takes a sharp breath, not allowing himself to meet her eye. 

“Are you mad, Ajax?” 

He flinches.

“You’re giving up?”

“It’s for their safety, mama,” he laughs humorlessly.

She scoffs.

“My son, I do not know what plagues you,” she lets out a forlorn breath, “I do not know what you saw in those woods when I lost you for those three horrible days, and I know you have grown since—but surely you are not thinking clearly.”

Ajax loves his family unconditionally, endlessly, but they will never know about those three months for him that were three days for them. They will never know that the lanky limbs and awkward smile turning into firm muscle and sharp eyes was not ‘puberty’ as the village doctor had told his father. 

His mother sighs when he does not respond.

“I wanted to run away, too,” she says. 

“What?” he says in disbelief, “when?”

“All the time,” she laughs, “when I was walking down the aisle, when we moved into our first house, when your older siblings were born.”

Ajax turns back to the grass, watching a pair of chickadees chase each other on the branch of a birch tree. He thinks of his twins.

“When I had you, I ran away,” she confesses, “I worried your father sick, left a newborn you with your barely-tween older siblings with him.”

He did not know of this, it always seemed to come so naturally when he watched his mother with Anton and Tonia and Teucer.

“I wasn’t making enough milk, and I was so scared,” she says, “what if I can’t feed you? What if I don’t take enough care of your siblings? What if I can’t be enough? I asked myself those questions every second and I just… ran away. I went to my tato ’s house and just hid.”

“What made you come back?” he asks softly.

“You, of course,” she answers, taking his face in her palm, “your siblings, too. But really, it was your father who didn’t let me go.”

Ajax smiles.

“You know what he said to me?” she laughs, “he said ‘I don’t care what I have to do, woman, I’ll make milk for the little rascal myself if I have to, just come back to me.’”

He laughs, too, leaning into the warm touch of his mother.

“I messed up,” he says.

His mother gives him a knowing look, “I think we both know you were never going to stay away.” 

He purses his lips as he watches her hand reach for the scarf around his neck, the last thing you gave him before he left. She rubs the fabric between her fingers, tugging lightly as she speaks.

“You haven’t taken this off, I think you knew in your heart, Ajax.”

He makes a questioning hum.

“This scarf,” she says, but he doesn’t understand.

“She gave it to me before I left.”

“She knew, too.”

“Knew what?”

“That you were going to go back to your babies.”

“What do you mean?”

“This scarf,” his mother says again, “did she not tell you?”

“What?”

“It’s what your twins were wrapped in when they were born, probably,” she runs her finger along the stitching of the patchwork, “it’s red, and it’s stitched inside out to ward off faeries, I was wondering where you’d gotten it.”

Their swaddles. His babies’ swaddles that you had woven into a scarf and wrapped around him like some soft ritual. Perhaps that was your intention, to bind him to you forever through the very delicate thing that wrapped up the product of his and your loving each other at their parturition.

Six years. He did not know of their existence for six years, and they lived well because they have the most wonderful mother. Being able to see you as a parent, having his children, his lover who holds his beating heart in her hands, Ajax does not think there could be anything more wonderful. And yet, can he ever do right by you? By his twins?

“You just needed some time, son,” his mother sighs, ruffling his hair.

“I—I have to go,” he breathes, heart racing. 

His mother smiles at him knowingly, and he bends down to wrap her shawl tightly around her before he kisses her forehead in a hasty farewell.

“Bring them here sometime,” she says, “or I’ll make the trip myself.”

He chuckles, turning around and running home.

You see him approaching in the darkness from where you sit on the porch, fiery hair and the bright red patchwork scarf whipping wildly in the wind. Your heart climbs into your throat and you can feel the very racing rhythm in your ears. He came back.

“I’m sorry,” he says before you, breathless.

“Is that all?” 

He purses his lips, brows scrunching as he searches your expression.

“You knew I'd come back,” he says, not a question.

You laugh incredulously, because for all that has happened, you did. You knew it better than you’d ever known anything. You felt it with your breath, the tired muscle and sinew of your body, in your very gnawing stomach, you knew.

“Yeah.”

Despite it all, you knew he would come back just as he always has, returning to you, to your babies, like the sun to the skyline and the birds to their roost. You knew it as soon as he turned to his twins that night, as soon as you saw the look in his eyes when he came back from putting them to bed. That’s why you had wrapped that scarf around his neck, the one you had stitched out of the very fabric your twins were born into as if it were a ritual of handfasting that ancient Fontainians performed during their marriage ceremonies, to tie him to you and your twins forever.

“I’m so sorry.”

He falls to his knees before you as if he is being knighted, picks your hand up from your lap and places a kiss to your knuckles. His lips are cold, but soft and so damned familiar.

“You do not deserve a thing like me,” he says onto your skin, “but I swear that I will be yours, at your feet, I will—”

“Ajax,” you breathe, and he kisses the back of your hand again.

“I will do right by you,” kiss, “I will return to you, always,” kiss, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

“I know,” you say, running a gentle hand through his fiery hair. 

“No,” he kisses the pulse of your wrist as he looks at you, “I’m sorry I wasn’t home for dinner.”

And that is the battering ram to your guarded walls. Your lungs shudder with the force of your oncoming tears and you lunge forward, knocking him back onto his heels as your arms wrap around his neck. He’s here, he’s here, he’s here.

Ajax came back to you, as he always has.

“Hey,” he soothes, hand in your hair, “hey, hey, my love.” 

You sob, “don’t you do that again.”

“You sound like you’re scolding our babies,” he laughs and you sob harder because our babies , his and yours.

“I don’t care if you are setting the world on fire, if you are going to wage a war against the very sky,” you hiccup, “if you want to drag every creature from the Abyss and fight them with your bare hands. I don’t care as long as you come back to us—to me.”

You weep and he holds you, rubbing your back and kissing your skin.

“You know,” he whispers onto your shoulder, “mama wants to meet them.”

“You told her?”

“Yeah,” he chuckles, “she cried—said I have to tell you how proud she is of you.”

You cry harder.

He brings your legs gingerly around his waist before he hoists you up, letting you hang onto him as he brings you inside. He sets you down on the dining table, caging himself between your thighs and resting a palm on your knee.

“Hey now,” he smiles, coaxing your head up so that he could see your face.

You bite your trembling lip, tears refracting his beautiful smile. You blink and it beads down your face, and you watch his smile soften his azure-blue eyes, his thumb brushing the wetness off your cheek. 

“Look at me baby,” he says, “I love you.”

“Ajax,” you sob, “I love you.”

His smile somehow brightens, eyes so soft and so warm you want to be consumed by it.

“You came back to me,” you say as if your words would make it feel more real.

He smiles again, and his joy warms the heart in your throat, and your world spins on its axis when you feel his mouth on yours, a soft, tender kiss that lasts all but a few seconds. Yet, the creature in your heart is reborn and it howls of want and want and want.

“Yes,” he laughs, “I came back to you, lovely.”

Ajax hears muffled giggling accompanied by the warbling of the birds, and he grins before he can even crack his eyes open. 

“Morning papa!” 

He beams, “hey babies, did you miss your daddy?”

The twins hop over you ecstatically, tackling him on the bed with giggles and litanies of ‘yes’ and ‘duh’ and ‘of course’. He gives them each their greeting kisses, and they settle in the gap between you and him on the bed. Milena nuzzles into him, and he gently brushes her hair from her face.

The morning light familiarly filters through your curtains, dancing on the planes of his entire soul as the three pieces of it lay on the bed. He watches Nikolai play with your hair, and your soft sleepy gaze on your son makes him feel alive. 

“Your mama is so beautiful, isn’t she?” 

And then you look at him, and Ajax is awestruck by that alone. 

“Yeah!” the twins say simultaneously.

He asks after them, how their letters are, how their èrhú learning is going. Nikolai’s going to be having a performance very soon and Milena has already earned badges from her scouts training. Nikolai is very enthusiastic about ‘finally’ having a cool scar to match his father’s many ones and though Ajax’s heart aches to see his son’s soft child skin marred by a reminder of such sorrow, he smiles because he is here. Here, where his heart lies across from him, smiling so beautifully that he thinks he is dreaming, and his two children are laying contentedly with him.

He watches as you clamber up from bed, gathering your twins and hoisting them up for their shower because they’ve ‘got to get to school!’. It is unreal, the way he is elated by merely preparing breakfast for his little family that morning.

“Ajax, go get your daughter.”

He turns, your words inspiring his heart to flutter. Nikolai sits on your hip as you bring him down in his adorable little school uniform that is reminiscent of sailors in those children’s plays at the Opera Epiclese. 

He obliges, but not before stopping to plant a kiss on your mouth that makes his son go ‘eww’. He climbs the stairs to find his Milena waiting for him to do her hair, and he sits happily gathering her soft copper-tinged locks up into curly pigtails. She thanks him with a kiss to his cheek, and before he knows it, breakfast has been cleared up, Hugo is on his leash, and he is on the way to drop his children off at their first day of school; hand in hand with his wonderful lover and the mother of his twins.

École Élémentaire de Lucine, the sign says. It’s a wonderfully green space nestled just a ways away from the Fountain of Lucine, and the sound of screaming and giggling children can be heard from miles away. 

Ajax wraps his twins up tightly in a farewell hug, kissing their hair and their cheeks and their cute little noses. They do the same to you, and before long, they are off.

“Who’s gonna cry?” Ajax inquires in a conspiratorial whisper, snaking his arm around your waist. “I think our Milly is going to act tough but she’s for sure going to shed a few tears.”

His lover laughs, “oh, I have my bets placed.”

“Really?” he gasps, “trying to get ahead of me, hm?”

You roll your eyes and he smiles, watching the twins as they line up with the other children, greeting each other and shaking hands. You tell him some of their names because you’ve met a few of them at each of the twins’ activities, but Ajax is a little too distracted watching their bright little faces.

Neither of them are crying. 

“Looks like the bet was null,” he pouts as they start to file in.

“Oh I wouldn’t say that quite yet.”

“Bye papa, bye-bye mama!” Nikolai says with a wave.

“Bye-bye!” Milena adds. “Love you daddy!”

Ajax feels a lump in his throat, and then he chokes up. 

“Jackpot,” you smile.

He looks at you, lips wobbling and vision blurring. 

“Oh, come here you big baby.”

He falls into you, arms snaking around your middle and face finding its home in your shoulder blade. The other parents are probably looking at him weirdly if they aren’t busy doing the same thing, though he couldn’t care any less. He can almost feel Hugo rolling his eyes, settling down into the cobbled street as the canine creature waits for his two humans.

“Next time, I’m coming back with the entire world at your door,” he sniffles. 

“No thank you, you sap.”

“The universe, then, when I come back in two weeks.”

“Not that either.”

“Then how could I ever thank you? For this, for our beautiful kids?”

You laugh, “just come back to us, Ajax.”

He smiles at you then, leaning in and slotting his lips against yours, snaking his hands around your waist and pulling you flush against him. His skin against yours is an electrifying feeling.

“I love you three so much,” he says onto your lips.

You chuckle, pressing your forehead to his, “three?”

He hums, lifting up to face you, “four, sorry Hugo.”

The dog grunts.

“Four?”

Ajax furrows his brows, “I’m not sure if I can say I love the domovyk, so yes, four.”

You huff a laugh, fixing him with a look.

“I’ve got the maths right!” he says, trailing off, “right…?”

He looks from your knowing eyes, down to your stomach, then back up. A smile breaks across your face, and you are glowing, and Ajax is devastated by your honey-gaze as his arms wrap impossibly tighter around your waist.

“You’re serious?” he says breathlessly, “you’re—you’re sure?”

He almost left, almost missed it again.

“I don’t recall being one to joke,” you reply, but even you can’t fight your own mirth. 

“Oh my god,” he breathes, “oh my god, we need to go into the city and do some shopping—find you a warmer coat, then we can go grab some things from the bakery—we’ll get a crib—are you tired? Ha-have you been to the doctors? Let’s—”

“Ajax,” you giggle, and his heart picks up speed, “My Ajax.”

His gaze softens, and he can’t help the way his heart flutters, leaning in to kiss you as if you were his breath. He’s worried, electrified, terrified, entirely glorious.

“We have time,” you say, clasping your hands behind the nape of his neck.

Ajax is grinning wildly when he bends down and throws his arms around your legs, lifting you up easily and pressing his lips to your belly. And when your fingers tangle in his hair as you tell him to put you down, under the mid-summer sun in front of his two children’s school with a pale white dog barking circles around him, he laughs onto his lover’s tender lips. 

“I love you,” he says, “I love you, I love you, I love you.”

It is incandescent.

Chapter Text

Ajax must be the luckiest man in this frigid palace of ice, he thinks. 

How could he not be? His two children are excelling in school and his dear lover is carrying his baby. He has a holiday planned to take them to meet their grandparents in the winter and he is due to go pick them up from school tomorrow afternoon. 

As he finishes up his dreadful paperwork in his office situated amongst the many great halls of Zapolyarny Palace, his thoughts can’t help but wander back to you again and again, like the tides lapping against the sandy shore of his home in Morepesok. His own home, the ferry of your lap. 

A helpless grin makes its way onto his face as he packs up, throwing his travel bag over his shoulder because like hell he’d go back to his residence and waste precious time that could be spent traveling towards Fontaine right at this very moment. He thinks of your sleeping face, your beautiful skin, the way your graceful hand smooths over the swell of your belly as you sit across from him over warm cups of tea. Your baby bump. A baby that sleeps soundly in the comfort of your womb, born out of his worship of you. 

His fingers tingle when he remembers the first time he felt the little thing kick, the way his eyes welled up with tears and looked at you as if you were bequeathing the entire universe to him.

He is invigorated to think that he will get to share in the bundle of joy with you, his two precious twins—his entire family. He could only have ever dreamt of such delights. 

“Tartaglia.”

“Celestia al-fucking-mighty,” he curses, clutching his chest in surprise. 

That is a rare thing for him; to be startled by anything. The thought of his wonderful lover and his children often veil his hyper-vigilance, softening him at the edges. A few years ago he probably would have thought it the worst thing in the world, but now he thinks what a privilege it is, to be so incandescent that his usually cutthroat survival instincts have been dulled even just a little.

“Arlecchino,” he says, watching the woman step out of the shadows of the hallway. “You here to claim my head?”

She gives him an unamused look, “more or less.”

Ajax steels himself then. If she is here to collect her end of the deal they made those months ago, he needs to prepare himself. Only the gods above know the extent of just how insane all of the past favours owed between the Fatui Harbingers have been, and Ajax is speaking from the perspective of having seen literal guts on the palace floor.

“Very well, Arlecchino, name your price,” Ajax says lightly, hoping his anxiety does not betray him. If he is to face unspeakable fates, then he would at least like to kiss you one more time, to tell Nikolai a story and to listen to Milena talk about the bugs she saw most recently. 

But he isn’t going to die, he has you to go back to, his twins and his unborn babe. He hopes it’s a duel, then—he would kill to fight his colleague. A part of him buzzes at this prospect.

“Your chair,” she says.

His jaw falls open, “what?”

“Your chair,” she repeats, “the one in your office. I want it.”

“Sorry?”

“Don’t make me repeat myself a second time, Tartaglia.”

A chair. A chair from his office. A chair he was just sitting on before leaving. A normal working desk chair!

“You’re messing with me,” he breathes.

“Now, why would I do that?” she fixes him with a bored expression, as if she is expecting him to go there right now and come back lugging his office chair to her and apologize for causing her trouble.

It’s a good chair, admittedly, ergonomic and easy to keep clean, but it’s not anything special; it came with the room. She totally has carpenters available who are more than willing to build her a hundred more of the same thing had she asked.

“I would have let her go without a favour,” Arlecchino adds when he stays there with his jaw hanging open.

Ajax’s eyes widen, “c’mon comrade, taking advantage of your junior?”

She looks at him again, something glinting in her eyes in warning.

“I will send someone for it right now.”

With that, Ajax sends his assistant to pack up the chair (‘add a little bow’ he instructs for good measure) and goes on his merry way. He boards the ship that will take him through Snezhnaya into the Fontainian waters, in the direction of where his heart sleeps in the comfort of the Marcotte woods. He kicks back on a deck chair, pulling out a photograph of his twins sitting on your lap, in their uniforms and their toothy smiles as you gaze upon them with stars in your lovely eyes. 

Ajax wouldn’t have it any other way.